Measuring plastic deformation in epitaxial silicon after thermal oxidation

Residual stress from thermal oxidation can cause plastic deformation in silicon microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). This paper presents a novel method to distinguish elastic and plastic strain in silicon beams, by removing the oxide layer to show the plastic strain. A lever mechanism is used as a mechanical amplifier. The plasticity model by Alexander and Haassen (AH) is used in a numerical model to predict the elastic and plastic strain. Experiments in epitaxially grown silicon show significantly less plastic strain than predicted by the model. We conclude that the AH model is not valid for epitaxially grown silicon with very little initial dislocations. Since epitaxially grown silicon generally has less dislocations compared to floating zone silicon we recommend using the former when plastic deformation is to be avoided.