Fracture strength of polycrystalline silicon

A structure has been developed to measure the fracture strength of thin films that allows for a large amount of statistical data to be generated from a single die. The strength of a material is determined by measuring the displacement at fracture of cantilever beams bending in-plane. This device has been used to measure the fracture strain of three different polysilicon materials: polysilicon from two different MCNC MUMPS runs and a polysilicon fabricated at the Microfabrication Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. The strain at fracture of the MUMPS polysilicon was measured to be 1.5% +/- 0.2% for both MCNC MUMPS runs. The Berkeley polysilicon exhibited a fracture strength of 1.2% +/- 0.1%, a difference from the MUMPS result that is statistically significant. Also, no statistical difference in fracture strength was measured on specimens that were super-critically carbon dioxide dried as opposed to furnace dried. In a separate experiment, the Young's modulus of the MCNC MUMPS polysilicon was found to be 173 +/- 20 GPa.