Carbon Nanotube Based Interconnect Technology: Opportunities and Challenges

As candidate materials for future wiring technologies, carbon nanotubes possess extraordinary physical and electrical characteristics. Carbon nanotubes have high current carrying capacity, excellent thermal conductivity, low thermal expansion coefficients, and are less susceptible to electromigration than conventional interconnect materials such as copper, tungsten and aluminum. It is likely that carbon nanotubes in combination with conventional materials will be implemented as a hybrid solution in on-chip interconnect technologies. Contact resistance at the nanotube–metal interface becomes a primary area for reliability engineering. Recent improvements in plasma based processing have demonstrated that individual, high-length-to-diameter ratio, vertically oriented carbon nanotubes can be fabricated to achieve architectures useful for advanced technologies. In this chapter, we present an overview of carbon nanotubes based electronics and describe our recent works in the development of carbon nanotube as a candidate interconnect material. The overview is limited to the fundamental characteristics of carbon nanotubes as implemented in wiring applications. We address the challenges and opportunities facing carbon nanotube implementation in CMOS semiconductor processing, as well as other possible nanoelectromechanical applications.