Carbon Nanotubes Interconnects for Nanoelectronics Circuits

Future nanoelectronics will be enabled only by providing the effective capability of connecting the nanometric devices to the circuit boards, therefore a major challenge is the design and fabrication of the nano-interconnects. For nanotechnology applications the limits imposed by physics, materials, assembly and design could not be overcome by simply scaling the conventional metal/dielectric systems: innovation in new materials, new technology and new system integration techniques is required. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are recently discovered carbon structures (Iijima, 1991), which have been soon considered as emerging research materials (ITRS, 2007) for nanoelectronics applications (Fig.1), because of their unique properties (Avouris et al., 2003; Saito et al., 2004; Anantram & Leonard, 2006). CNT interconnects are expected to meet many of the requirements for technologies below the 22nm node (ITRS, 2007) in terms of mechanical strength, thermal conductivity and electrical performances. This Chapter is devoted to CNT interconnects, proposed for wiring and for packaging nanotechnology ICs, with the aim of presenting the state-of-the-art of electrodynamics and circuit modelling of CNTs and to provide performance comparisons between conventional and CNT interconnects. Some case-studies of practical application are carried-out, referring to real-world wiring and packaging problems for future nanoelectronics.