Long Slender Piezo-Resistive Silicon Microprobes for Fast Measurements of Roughness and Mechanical Properties inside Micro-Holes with Diameters below 100 µm

This article summarizes their metrological properties for fast roughness and shape measurements including noise, damping, tip form, tip wear, and probing forces and presents the first results on the measurement of mechanical surface parameters.

Due to the small mass of the cantilever microprobes, roughness measurements at very high traverse speeds up to 15 mm/s are possible. At these high scanning speeds, considerable wear of the integrated silicon tips was observed in the past. In this paper, a new tip-testing artefact with rectangular grooves of different width was used to measure this wear and to measure the tip shape, which is needed for morphological filtering of the measured profiles and, thus, for accurate form measurements.