Interfacial toughness measurements for thin films on substrates Review Article

There are more than 200 different methods for measuring adhesion, suggesting it to be material, geometry and even industry specific. This availability has exploded at least partly due to the arrival of dissimilar material interfaces and thin films and the ease with which microfabrication techniques apply to silicon technology. Having an eye toward those tests utilized for thin films, this paper reviews only a few of these techniques. The emphasis is on measuring thin film adhesion from the standpoint of fracture mechanics, when the film is mechanically or by other means removed from the substrate, and the amount of energy necessary for this process is calculated per unit area of the removed film. This tends to give values approaching the true work of adhesion at small thickness and greater values of the practical work of adhesion at larger thickness, all being in the 30–30,000 nm range. The resulting large range of toughnesses is shown to be dependent on the scale of plasticity achieved as controlled by film thickness, microstructure, chemistry and test temperature.