A method to measure the fatigue property of a micro-cantilever beam

Many results on the fatigue properties of a MEMS structure have been reported, among which the typical approaches were based on and developed from the principles of detecting the flaws and their propagations, such as using a fan shape comb - drivers to yield cyclic compression and tension, and then, to observe the flaw propagation in a Si beam structure. This paper aims at describing the fatigue phenomenon by using the gradually variable parameters i. e. , mean E method, and then, proposing a test structure, through measuring capacitance to describe the fatigue property. This capacitance has a close relation to the displacement induced by the force applied on. The mean Young's modulus E is calculated according to the measured capacitance to reflect the fatigue property of the simple MEMS structure. At the end of this article, this method is verified by ANSYS.