Parameter extraction from electrical measurements on cantilever beams

During surface micromachining, the deposition and processing steps can cause variations in mechanical properties like Young's Modulus as well as in geometry which in turn decide the final performance of the device. Hence it is necessary to design appropriate test structures to measure these properties. We describe here simple electrical measurements of pull-in and resonance frequency on polysilicon cantilever beams to extract Young's Modulus, Poisson's Ratio and gap. A simple electrical method to estimate the force of stiction from pull-in and pull-out measurements on cantilever beams is also described.