Fatigue of polycrystalline silicon for MEMS applications: Crack growth and stability under resonant loading conditions

Although bulk silicon is not known to exhibit susceptibility to cyclic fatigue, micron-scale structures made from silicon films are known to be vulnerable to degradation by fatigue in ambient air environments, a phenomenon that has been recently modeled in terms of a mechanism of sequential oxidation and stress-corrosion cracking of the native oxide layer

Failure by fracture and fatigue in "NANO" and "BIO" materials

The behavior of nanostructured materials/small-volume structures and biologi-cal/bio-implantable materials, so-called "nano" and "bio" materials, is currently much in vogue in materials science. One aspect of this field, which to date has received only limited attention, is their fracture and fatigue properties. In this paper, we examine two topics in this area, namely the premature fatigue failure of silicon-based micron-scale structures for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and the fracture properties of mineralized tissue, specifically human bone