Design and Performance Modeling for Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes as Local, Semiglobal, and Global Interconnects in Gigascale Integrated Systems

Based on physical models, distributed circuit models are presented for single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNs) and SWCN bundles that are valid for all voltages and lengths. These models can be used for circuit simulations and compact modeling. It is demonstrated that by customizing SWCN interconnects at the local, semiglobal, and global levels, several major challenges facing gigascale integrated systems can potentially be addressed. For local interconnects, monolayer or multilayer SWCN interconnects can offer up to 50% reduction in capacitance and power dissipation with up to 20% improvement in latency if they are short enough (<20 mum). For semiglobal interconnects, either latency or power dissipation can be substantially improved if bundles of SWCNs are used. The improvements increase as the cross-sectional dimensions scale down. For global interconnects, bandwidth density can be improved by 40% if there is at least one metallic SWCN per 3-nm
²
cross-sectional area