Fault reduction in Nonoscale VLSI interconnection by using carbon nanotubes technology

As the VLSI technology scales down, significant challenges are facing the fabrication, modeling, and performance of the integrated circuits. One of the major challenges for the continuiation of the Moore’s law is “interconnects” at nano-scale. Interconnects become as important as transistors in the current technologies and will dominate the chip performance at the future technologies. Beside their eletrical performance, their mechanical performnace will be important at the nano-scale. Wires should be resilient enough to cope with Back-End-Of-Line (BEOL) processes. Nano-technology has offered us many solutions to current technology problems. One of the major gift of this technology is Carbon Nanotubes (CNT). CNTs are a promising candidate to replace copper interconnects. They not only provide us with ballistic transport for semiconductors, but also have better mechanical performance. In this paper, we study the mechanical reliability of the CNT interconnects and compare it with their copper conterparts.

Copper Nano-Wire, Carbon Nanotubes, Fault Tolerance, Interconnections, VLSI