The Potential for Metal–Carbon Nanotubes Composites as Interconnects

Despite their high potential, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are yet to be effectively utilized in microelectronics due to challenges involved with their fabrication and integration with current microelectronic materials. This manuscript summarizes the effort made in fabricating the CNT-Cu composites for interconnects in microelectronics. Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and plasma enhanced CVD (PECVD) are used to grow CNTs on substrates covered with Ti, TiN and Al₂O₃ and several plating processes such as electroplating, electroless plating, and sputtering methods were used to create the Cu-CNT composite layer. The PECVD is the best approach in growing the CNT forest with the right density. The seed layers selected in this study were not effective in allowing electroplating to occur. The most successful method was to use TiN as an underlayer, PECVD for CNT growth and sputtering as plating technique.