Scaling trends and limitations of existing interconnect technologies are discussed and two prospective future solutions carbon nanotube (CNT) and optical interconnects are examined in detail. The inherent unscalability of metal interconnects and degradation of their performance in the light of ever-increasing transistor density and performance is emphasized. Problems with multi-layer low-k/copp...

Current carbon nanotube (CNT) synthesis methods include the production of ordered, free-standing vertically aligned arrays, the properties of which are partially governed by interactions between adjacent tubes. Using material parameters determined by atomistic methods, here we represent individual CNTs by a simple single degree of freedom (SDOF) “lollipop” model to investigate the formation, me...

Carbon nanotubes are a recently discovered material with excellent mechanical, thermal, and electronic properties. In particular, they are potential ballistic transporters and are theorized to have thermal conductivities greater than any other material currently known. In this thesis, we will examine two possible applications of carbon nanotubes in CMOS back-end processing. The first applicatio...

Carbon fibres have attracted interest from both the scientific and engineering communities due to their outstanding physical properties. Here we report that recently synthesized ultrathin diamond nanothread not only possesses excellent torsional deformation capability, but also excellent interfacial load-transfer efficiency. Compared with (10,10) carbon nanotube bundles, the flattening of nanot...

Carbon nanotubes have been explored as interconnects in solid acid fuel cells to improve the link between nanoscale Pt catalyst particles and macroscale current collectors. The nanotubes were grown by chemical vapor deposition on carbon paper substrates, using nickel nanoparticles as the catalyst, and were characterized using scanning electron microscopy and Raman spectroscopy. The composite el...