Analyzing Conductance of Mixed Carbon-Nanotube Bundles for Interconnect Applications

The carbon-nanotube (CNT) bundle is a potential candidate for deep-nanometer-interconnect applications due to its superior conductivity and current-carrying capabilities. A CNT bundle is generally a mixture of single-wall and multiwall CNTs (SWCNTs and MWCNTs) and has not been fully explored in previous studies. This letter introduces a diameter-dependent model to analyze the conductance of both SWCNTs and MWCNTs. Using this model, the conductance performance of the mixed CNT bundles is analyzed, and the estimation is consistent with the corresponding experimental result. This letter also demonstrates that the mixed CNT bundles can provide two to five times conductance improvement over copper by selecting the suitable parameters such as bundle width, tube density, and metallic tube ratio.