Micromechanical Characterization of AlCu Films for MEMS Using Instrumented Indentation Method

The micromechanical properties (i.e., hardness, elastic modulus, and stress–strain curve) of AlCu films were determined by an instrumented indentation test in this work. For three AlCu films with different thicknesses (i.e., 1 µm, 1.5 µm, and 2 µm), the same critical ratio (hmax/t) of 0.15 and relative indentation depth range of 0.15–0.5 existed, within which the elastic modulus (i.e., 59 GPa) and nanoindentation hardness (i.e., 0.75 GPa, 0.64 GPa and 0.63 GPa for 1 µm, 1.5 µm and 2 µm films) without pile-up and substrate influence can be determined. The yield strength (i.e., 0.754 GPa, 0.549 GPa and 0.471 GPa for 1 µm, 1.5 µm and 2 µm films) and hardening exponent (i.e., 0.073, 0.131 and 0.150 for 1 µm, 1.5 µm and 2 µm films) of Al-(4 wt.%)Cu films for MEMS were successfully reported for the first time using a nanoindentation reverse method. In dimensional analysis, the ideal representative strain εr was determined to be 0.038. The errors of residual depth hr between the simulations and the nanoindentation experiments was less than 5% when the stress–strain curve obtained by the nanoindentation reverse method was used for simulation.