A Comparative Study of Stress Determination Techniques in Polycrystalline Thin Films

Abstract

AbstractA review of the literature has shown that two major techniques are used to determine stress/strain in thin film structures: curvature measurement technique and internal stress measurement by the traditional sin2ψ technique. However, to date, there is no published comparison of the results from both techniques when they are applied to a given specimen.In this paper we compare both methods theoretically and experimentally. We show that, while in some cases similar information is obtained from both techniques, there are cases where the two measurements give different results. We will show that, in such cases, the two methods can be complementary. Thus, they can be used to yield a more complete description of the total stress/strain tensor in the material.