A circuit model for carbon nanotube interconnects: comparative study with Cu interconnects for scaled technologies

Semiconducting carbon nanotubes (CNT) have gained immense popularity as possible successors to silicon as the channel material for ultra high performance field effect transistors. On the other hand, their metallic counterparts have often been regarded as ideal interconnects for the future technology generations. Owing to their high current densities and increased reliability, metallic-single walled CNTs (SWCNTs) have been subjects of fundamental research both in theory as well as experiments. Metallic CNTs have been modeled for RF applications in (Burke, 2003) using an LC model. We present an efficient circuit compatible RLC model for metallic SW CNTs, and analyze the impact of SW CNTs on the performance of ultra scaled digital VLSI design.