High-frequency effects in carbon nanotube interconnects and implications for on-chip inductor design

This paper presents a rigorous investigation of high-frequency effects in carbon nanotube interconnects and their implications for the design and performance analysis of high-quality on-chip inductors. An accurate method is developed to calculate the frequency-dependent resistance and inductance of both single-walled (SWCNT) and multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) bundle interconnects. Our analysis reveals for the first time that skin effect (current redistribution) in CNT bundles is negligible compared to that in conventional metal conductors, which make them a very attractive and promising material for high-frequency applications, including on-chip inductor design in high-performance RF/mixed-signal circuits. It is subsequently shown that CNT based inductors can achieve nearly 4times higher Q factor than Cu based inductors.