Fabrication of a tensile test for polymer micromechanics

Abstract

In recent years one could observe the advent of polytronic systems e.g., systems whose electronics are based on organic materials. The use of cheap organic materials and inexpensive technologies such as roll-to-roll fabrication and ink-jet printing promise a new kind of electronics and applications. Devices under investigation are RF tags and displays based on organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs). One major advantage that these devices have in common is the possible flexible substrate they are fabricated on. As devices on flexible substrates will be bent during operation the reliability and therefore the knowledge of the mechanical properties of the materials used is important. Typical dimensions of functional organic layers in actual devices are in the range of several hundreds of nanometers. Therefore also for mechanical testing typical dimensions of the test specimens should be in the same range. We propose a test setup which enables the investigation of mechanical properties of submicrometer thick organic layers. It consists of a 1 μm thick polyimide substrate and a deposited functional layer. In this paper we present the necessary fabrication process based on the Bosch deep etching process of silicon.