Influence of variable temperature on performance of mixed-MWCNT, MWCNT and SWCNT nanostructures as interconnects for high-performance VLSI-IC design

The performance of mixed multi-walled carbon nanotube nanostructures, consisting of differently sized multi-walled carbon nanotube bundles, was evaluated as very large scale integrated interconnects at a range of temperatures for various nanotechnology nodes. The equivalent single conductor model is established to compute the performance of interconnect. These results are compared to similar analyses of multi-walled and single-walled carbon nanotubes, which are used as interconnects at nanotechnology nodes. The scattering resistance of interconnect is affected by electron–electron and electron–phonon scattering, which is increased. The performance, evaluated in terms of delay and power delay product, increased with increasing temperature from 200 to 450 K and for decreasing technology nodes sizes from 32 to 16 nm. The delay reduction (single-walled carbon nanotubes to mixed multi-walled carbon nanotubes) varied with temperature from 43 to 63%, 51 to 66% and 70 to 79% for the 32 nm, 22 nm and 16 nm nodes, respectively. Similarly, the delay reduction (multi-walled carbon nanotube to mixed multi-walled carbon nanotube) for the same nodes was from 13 to 1.3%, 20 to 9.3% and 52 to 50%. Thus, the novel mixed multi-walled carbon nanotube nanostructure performs better than multi-walled carbon nanotube and single-walled carbon nanotube nanostructures and is recommended as future interconnects material for high-performance integrated circuits design.