Cloud native EDA tools & pre-optimized hardware platforms
Posted on August 2, 2017
IBM Research at Albany Nanotech has recently published work with QuantumATK (http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4983072) investigating four novel metal nanowires as back-end-of-line interconnects.
The paper [1] demonstrates potential superior performance to the current Cu based nanowires as the future brings continued down-scaling of modern transistor technology.
3 properties required for the good performance of interconnects are:
QuantumATK was used to evaluate these 3 properties of Pt, Rh, Ir, Pd, and Cu nanowires (0.5 nm - 3 nm wide):
Nanowires with and without grain boundaries were constructed and optimized using the QuantumATK .
Schematic illustration of the transistor-interconnect technology for which properties of Pt, Rh, Ir and Pd nanowires were calculated using QuantumATK. Cross section of nanowire oriented along [110] is shown together with cohesive energy as a function of nanowire width (1), conductance/area for various metals (2) and relative resistivity as a function of average grain size (3).
(1) and (2) properties of Pt, Rh and Ir nanowires are superior to Cu. However, Cu outperforms the other metals in (3).
Interested in applying QuantumATK software to your research? Test our software or contact us at quantumatk@synopsys.com to get more information on QuantumATK platform for atomic-scale modeling.