Mechanical Characterization of Thin Films by the Capacitance-Voltage Measurement of Microstructures

This paper presents a novel and high-precision technology for extracting the Young’s modulus of thin films through the capacitance-voltage (C-V) measurement of microstructures. An algorithm considering the electric-mechanical coupling effect and the distributed character of microstructures is developed for extracting the Young’s modulus through the C-V measurement of microstructures. The average error percentage of the extracted Young’s modulus of single-crystalline silicon is below 1% and the high precision and repeatability of the present methodology are verified. Since the driving and response signals are both electric, they could be accomplished using existing semiconductor testing equipments through probing on the bonding pads of devices. Because hardware replacement could be avoided, this methodology shows substantial advantage over other property-extraction methods for large-scale implementation in semiconductor or MEMS fabs.