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HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Micromechanical test structures have been developed for evaluating mechanical properties of thin gold films. Using micromachining techniques, gold cantilever beams of different geometry (typically 40 to 100-µm-long, 2-µm-thick and around 1-µm-wide), were fabricated. These cantilevers were resonated by electrical excitation in a scanning electron microscope (SEM) and Young's modulus, Q-factor and fatigue properties were deduced from these experiments. The longest cantilevers showed a slight upward curvature which allowed the internal stress gradient to be evaluating.