Electrical Conduction and Reliability in Dual-Layered Graphene Heterostructure Interconnects

Dual-layer graphene (DLG) interconnects with hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) as intercalated insulating layer have been demonstrated. The DLG employs graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition process with h-BN serving as a barrier preventing interlayer scattering, which degrades carrier transport in multilayer graphene. The conductive behavior in dual-layer structures is compared with monolayer graphene and randomly stacked bilayer graphene. Reduced resistance is observed in DLG, which exhibits higher current-carrying capacity and maximum power density. In addition, DLG wire is shown to be robust under constant voltage stressing (10 V) at an elevated temperature (150°C) with the mean time to failure ~75 times higher than that of stacked bilayer graphene wires.