Performance evaluation of intercalation doped multilayer interconnects on low- k SnO 2 substrate

Abstract In deep submicron (DSM) technology, scaling in cross-sectional dimensions of copper interconnects leads to their deteriorated performance in terms of propagation delay and power dissipation. Several studies reveal that intercalation-doped multilayer graphene nanoribbons (I-MLGNR) are an ultimate alternative to copper. In this work, first, we have synthesized and characterized SnO 2 solely to extract material parameters (e.g., permittivity, crystallinity, morphology) required for the simulation-based evaluation of the interconnect structure, to further examine the impact of a low-k SnO 2 substrate on the effectiveness of stage-I FeCl 3 I-MLGNR at a DSM technology node of 14 nm. The presented work analyzes the propagation delay, power dissipation, and power delay product (PDP) based on the evaluation of impedance parameters (i.e., capacitance, inductance, and resistance). Propagation delay and power dissipation in I-MLGNR are compared considering SnO 2 substrate/SiO 2 substrate under the impact of operating temperature of interconnects (300 K–500 K). The key findings of the manuscript are that using a thermally stable inorganic dielectric (i.e. SnO 2 ), experimentally validated in the GHz domain, a significant delay reduction (at a global level interconnect length of 1000 μm) of 10.8% is obtained with SnO 2 as substrate for I-MLGNR than with SiO 2 . And a power reduction of 5.7% is observed. On average, a significant reduction of 15.93% is observed in PDP. It suggests that the dielectric materials with low-k (SnO 2 in the present study) can significantly reduce delay and power dissipation in I-MLGNR compared with the conventional SiO 2 dielectric medium. The results of this research are expected to significantly improve the efficiency of I-MLGNR on-chip interconnects and offer vital insights for analyzing signal characteristics in MLGNR interconnects.