Electro-Thermal Actuator for On-Chip Nanoscale Tensile Tests: Analytical Modelling and Multi-Physics Simulations

On-Chip Mechanical Characterization using an Electro-thermo-mechanical Actuator

“…3. The key point of this procedure is the analytical mechanical model discussed in [9] for a different configuration of the sensor and of the specimen. On the basis of this model, the displacements d and d0 of the shuttle connected to a specimen or not connected to a specimen can be expressed by equations (2) and (3), respectively: …”

“…The present paper is focused on the mechanical characterization of materials at the micron scale by means of a fully on-chip methodology [8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. The advantages of on-chip approaches for the mechanical characterization at the micro scale derive from the possibility to test the material in conditions almost identical to those found in the real applications, thus avoiding external disturbances coming from off-chip laboratory tests [14].…”

“…The device includes an electro thermal actuator (ETA), a parallel plate electrostatic sensor and suspension springs; in the version studied here the micro device has been produced to test in tensile loading a 0.7 μm thick polysilicon specimen micro fabricated together with the whole micro system. The proposed system could be used to test other kinds of built-in specimens or, as done in previous works, as a material testing sytem at the microscale [9,13,15] useful to perform tensile tests e.g. on nano fibres and on carbon nano tubes.…”

“…It is an evolution of the devices previously presented in [9,13,15] and was produced by ST-Microelectronics exploiting the capabilities of the ThELMA (c) (Thick Epitaxial Layer for Microactuators and Accelerometers) process (see e.g. [8]).…”

“…One end of the specimen is rigidly connected to the shuttle, while the other end is rigidly connected to the substrate. The main differences of the device here discussed with respect to the versions presented in [9,13,15] are the following: the production process; the sensing part which is here designed to measure displacements and is placed between the shuttle and the specimen; the data reduction procedure; the experimental set-up for the capacitance variation measurement; the specimen shape and dimensions.…”