Experimental Technique for Fatigue Testing of MEMS in Liquids

An experimental technique for the fatigue testing of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) in liquid environments is described in this paper. A bulk-micromachined MEMS tensile specimen with integral grips was fabricated, and tensile-tensile fatigue tests were performed in air and in a saline solution. The fatigue life of the 200-nm thick aluminum specimen was observed to range from 1.2 × 10
⁶
to 2.2 × 10
⁶
cycles when tested at equal values of the mean and alternating stresses of 0.13 GPa.