The impact of vacancy defects on CNT interconnects: From statistical atomistic study to circuit simulations

We have performed statistical atomistic simulations with tight-binding approach to investigate the effects of randomly distributed mono-vacancy defects in metallic single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) interconnects. We also extracted defective resistances from the atomistic simulations and performed circuit-level simulations to compare the performance of interconnects with and without defects. We have found that the defects induce significant fluctuations of SWCNT resistance with a median value showing an Ohmic-like behaviour. Fortunately, the resistance depends only on the diameter of SWCNTs and not on their chirality. Moreover, our circuit simulations show that the defective resistance induces important propagation time delay ratio that should be accounted for when designing CNT interconnects.