Dynamic fatigue of silicon

Dynamic fatigue of silicon is a fairly recent area of materials research, having been detected for the first time in 1992. Within the past year, there have been several reports on silicon fatigue behavior describing novel phenomena and models for their origin. The findings include: an increase in high-cycle fatigue lifetime with a decrease in peak stress, the dependence of fatigue on the cyclic stress levels but not on the frequency of the cycle, and morphological changes in the surface silica during fatigue. Of the mechanisms proposed, the most likely candidate is one that involves mechanically induced damage in the silicon as a result of cyclic stresses. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.