Delay and Crosstalk on Future 32 nm Node Interconnects: Impact of ULK-Air-Gap Architecture

With technological developments towards 32 nm node ICs, interconnects effects have become fundamental on integrated circuits performances. Signal propagation will in particular be affected by complexity of technological stacks. In order to face integration and performance issues, air gap architecture constitutes a potential alternative to porous dielectric materials. After showing that air gap addresses the challenges on delay time for considered node, dimension effects corresponding to several kinds of applications will be analyzed in order to extract limits of integration regarding time-domain performances in terms of delay and crosstalk