This study reports in-situ observations of the buckling evolution of microelectromechanical structures during etching of their underneath sacrificial layers. As the etching went on, the buckling pattern evolved from mode I, the sinusoidal half-waves, to mode II, the constrained sinusoidal half-waves, to mode III, the conventional mode, and finally to mode IV, the blister-like local buckling. Closed formulae were derived from theoretical analysis, and the experimental results agreed well with the theoretical ones.
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