Microscale Laser Shock Peening of Thin Films, Part 2: High Spatial Resolution Material Characterization

Microscale Laser Shock Peening (LSP) is a technique that can be potentially applied to manipulate the residual stress distributions in metal film structures and thus improve the reliability of micro-devices. This paper reports high-spatial-resolution characterization of shock treated copper thin films on single-crystal silicon substrates, where scanning x-ray microtopography is used to map the relative variation of the stress/strain field with micron spatial resolution, and instrumented nanoindentation is applied to measure the distribution of hardness and deduce the sign of the stress/strain field. The measurement results are also compared with 3-D simulation results. The general trends in simulations agree with those from experimental measurements. Simulations and experiments show that there is a near linear correlation between strain energy density at the film-substrate interface and the X-ray diffraction intensity contrast.