Annealing effects on effective Young’s modulus of Ti/Au multi-layered microcantilevers

This paper reports the annealing effects on the effective Young's modulus ( E eff ) of Ti/Au multi-layered microcantilevers. Microcantilevers with different dimensions are fabricated and subjected to the annealing. Resonance measurements for the as-fabricated microcantilevers and the annealed microcantilevers are performed to evaluate their resonance frequency. Based on the measured resonance frequency, the E eff of the microcantilevers is determined. The average E eff value of the annealed microcantilevers is increased by approximately 2.6% from 67.5 GPa to 69.3 GPa. Regardless of the annealing, the E eff of the microcantilevers is lower than the Young's modulus of bulk gold (78 GPa).