Influence of Thin Film Deposition on AFM Cantilever Tips in Adhesion and Young’s Modulus of MEMS Surfaces

Abstract

Adhesion is a critical factor in microelectromechanical systems (MEMSs) and is influenced by many parameters. In important fields, such as microassembly, an improved understanding of adhesion can result in higher precision. This study examines the influence of deposition of gold and titanium onto the atomic force microscope (AFM) tips in adhesion forces and Young’s modulus, between a few MEMS substrates (silicon, gold, and silver) and the AFM tips. It was found that, except for gold substrate, an AFM tip coated with gold has the highest adhesion force of 42.67 nN for silicon substrates, whereas the titanium-coated AFM tip decreases the force for all the samples. This study suggests that such changes must be taken into account while studying the adhesion force. The final results indicate that utilizing gold substrate with titanium AFM tip led to the lowest adhesion force, which could be useful in adhesion force measurement during microassembly.

Antibacterial and Antibiofilm Activity of Nanostructured Copper Films Prepared by Ionized Jet Deposition

“…The abuse of antibiotics treatments has led to the urgent need of alternative strategies in clinics [6][7][8][9][10]. The search for antimicrobials with pleiotropic activities is encouraged to prevent, or at least delay, the development of bacterial resistances, which, on the contrary, is a common and rapid phenomenon occurring when bacteria have long contact with a targetspecific molecule.…”

AFM‐Based Hamaker Constant Determination with Blind Tip Reconstruction

“…Thus, we use the geometry of the AFM tip and surface roughness instead of a statistical parameter for our model. Besides particle contamination removal, knowing the adhesion force is beneficial for applications fields such as biotechnology [34] , micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) [35] or 2D materials. [36] In particular, we develop a methodology which combines the numerical Hamaker theory in the form of pairwise summation [27,37] and blind tip reconstruction (BTR) to compute the vdW force.…”

“…Thus, we use the geometry of the AFM tip and surface roughness instead of a statistical parameter for our model. Besides particle contamination removal, knowing the adhesion force is beneficial for applications fields such as biotechnology, [ 34 ] micro‐electro‐mechanical systems, [ 35 ] or 2D materials. [ 36 ]…”