As microchips get smaller and smaller, the size of their interconnects with copper shrinks, resulting in faster and faster increases in resistivity at the nanoscale. Solving this impending technology bottleneck is one of the major issues in the semiconductor industry today.
Reducing the resistivity by changing the crystal orientation of the interconnect material is a promising solution to this problem. Two researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute conducted an electron transfer measurement in epitaxial single crystal tungsten (W), a potential solution. They conducted a first-principles simulation and found that the orientation-dependent effect. And they found that anisotropy of resistivity is most pronounced between layers of two specially oriented lattice structures, namely W (001) and W (110). This work is also published this week in Journal of Applied Physics.
The research team is continuing to explore the anisotropic size effects of other metals, at the same time that these metals have an aspherical Fermi surface, such as molybdenum. They found that the orientation of the surface relative to the layer orientation and transport direction is crucial because it determines the actual increase in resistivity as these dimensions decrease.
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