Specimen Size Effect on Fatigue Properties of Surface-Micromachined Al-3%Ti Thin Films

This paper presents high cycle fatigue properties of an Al-3%Ti thin film, used in a RF (radio-frequency) MEMS switch for a mobile phone and also describes new test method for obtaining static and dynamic characteristics of thin film and reliability evaluation method on MEMS device with thin film developed by authors. Durability should be ensured for such devices under cycling load. Therefore, with the proposed specimen and test procedure, tensile and fatigue tests were performed to obtain mechanical and fatigue properties. The specimen was made with dimensions of 1000μm long, 1.0μm thickness, and 3 kinds of width, 50, 100 and 150μm. High cycle fatigue tests for each width were also performed, from which the fatigue strength coefficient and the fatigue strength exponent were found to be 193MPa and −0.02319 for 50μm, 181MPa and −0.02001 for 100μm, and 164MPa and −0.01322 for 150μm, respectively. We found that the narrower specimen is, the longer fatigue life of Al-3%Ti is and the wider specimen is, the more susceptible to stress level fatigue life of Al-3%Ti was.