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Topological Metal MoP Nanowire for Interconnect.

Hyeuk Jin HanSushant KumarGangtae JinXiaoyang JiJames L HartDavid J HynekQuynh P SamVicky HasseClaudia FelserDavid G CahillRavishankar SundararamanJudy J Cha
Published in: Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) (2023)
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 unprecedented resistivity scaling of topological metal MoP nanowires and show that the resistivity values are superior to those of nanoscale Cu interconnects below 500 nm 2 cross-section areas. The calculated cohesive energy of MoP suggests better stability against electromigration, enabling a barrier-free design of MoP interconnects. MoP nanowires are more resistant to surface oxidation than the 20-nm thick Cu reference. The thermal conductivity of MoP is comparable to those of Ru and Co, which are considered prominent barrier-free interconnects. Most importantly, we demonstrate that the dimensional scaling of the MoP nanowires, in terms of line resistance versus total cross-sectional area, is competitive to those of effective Cu with barrier/liner and barrier-less Ru interconnects, suggesting MoP is an attractive alternative for the current scaling challenge of Cu interconnects. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
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