Topological Metal MoP Nanowire for Interconnect

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that topological metal MoP nanowires exhibit resistivity scaling superior to copper and ruthenium, making them promising candidates for next-generation low-resistance interconnects in scaled integrated circuits.

Contribution

It introduces MoP nanowires as a topological metal with favorable resistivity scaling, addressing the challenge of interconnect resistance at nanoscale dimensions.

Findings

MoP nanowires have resistivity comparable to Cu below 500 nm$^2$ cross-section.

Resistivity scaling of MoP nanowires surpasses Cu and Ru interconnects.

MoP nanowires are promising for future nanoscale interconnect applications.

Abstract

The increasing resistance of Cu interconnects for decreasing dimensions is a major challenge in continued downscaling of integrated circuits beyond the 7-nm technology node as it leads to unacceptable signal delays and power consumption in computing. The resistivity of Cu increases due to electron scattering at surfaces and grain boundaries of the interconnects at the nanoscale. Topological semimetals, owing to their topologically protected surface states and suppressed electron backscattering, are promising material candidates to potentially replace current Cu interconnects as low-resistance interconnects. Here, we report the attractive resistivity scaling of topological metal MoP nanowires and show that the resistivity values are comparable to those of Cu interconnects below 500 nm$^2$ cross-section areas. More importantly, we demonstrate that the dimensional scaling of MoP nanowires, in terms of line resistance versus total cross-sectional area, is superior to those of effective Cu and barrier-less Ru interconnects, suggesting MoP is an attractive solution to the current scaling challenge of Cu interconnects.