Fully Integrated Graphene and Carbon Nanotube Interconnects for Gigahertz High-Speed CMOS Electronics

Carbon-based nanomaterials such as metallic single-walled carbon nanotubes, multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs), and graphene have been considered as some of the most promising candidates for future interconnect technology because of their high current-carrying capacity and conductivity in the nanoscale, and immunity to electromigration, which has been a great challenge for scaling down the traditional copper interconnects. Therefore, studies on the performance and optimization of carbon-based interconnects working in a realistic operational environment are needed in order to advance the technology beyond the exploratory discovery phase. In this paper, we present the first demonstration of graphene interconnects monolithically integrated with industry-standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology, as well as the first experimental results that compare the performance of high-speed on-chip graphene and MWCNT interconnects. The graphene interconnects operate up to 1.3-GHz frequency, which is a speed that is commensurate with the fastest high-speed processor chips today. A low-swing signaling technique has been applied to improve the speed of carbon interconnects up to 30%.

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