Stochastic Mechanical Characterization of Polysilicon MEMS: A Deep Learning Approach

Deep Learning strategies recently emerged as powerful tools for the characterization of heterogeneous materials. In this work, we discuss an approach for the characterization of the mechanical response of polysilicon films that typically constitute the movable structures of microelectro- mechanical systems (MEMS). A dataset of microstructures is digitally generated and a neural network is trained to provide the appropriate scattering in the values of the overall stiffness (in terms of the Young’s modulus) of the grain aggregate. Since results are framed within a stochastic procedure, the aim of the learning strategy is not to accurately reproduce the microstructure-informed response of the polysilicon film, but instead to provide a fast tool to be used at the device level for Monte Carlo analysis of the relevant performance indices. Accuracy of the proposed approach is assessed for very small samples of the polycrystalline aggregate to check if size effects are correctly captured.