A Brief Review of Recent Studies on Performance Improvement of Graphene Nanoribbon Interconnect

An excellent and distinct metal, Copper (Cu), continued to be an extensively used interconnect material for years. But today, with shrinking technology from millimeter to nanometer scale, Cu suffered tremendous reliability effects as interconnect material such as low electrical and thermal conduction, skin effect, parasitic effects, small mean free path (MFP), stress, etc. These issues triggered to seek for an alternative material whose performance would not degrade with scaling down of integrated circuits. Researchers in late found a material, Graphene, that appreciably supersede Cu as an interconnect material in the nanoscale technology. It is found from different proposed models, simulations, and analyses that Graphene nanoribbon's (GNR) performance did not deteriorate with the variation of length, width, temperature and also doping with other materials. Still, its performance was comparatively smoother than other interconnect materials. In this article, the performance of GNR and its types for various performance parameters like resistance, delay, crosstalk, bandwidth, power, etc., over traditional interconnect materials are reviewed and discussed.