Plasmonic, Carbon Nanotube and Conventional nano-interconnects: a comparison of propagation properties

The scaling of the integrated circuits foreseen by the technology roadmap imposes tight requirements to the interconnects, in terms of latency, energy density and bandwidth. Innovative solutions are proposed to replace the traditional copper technology at nanometric scale. In this paper we investigate the behavior of some of these innovative interconnects, namely carbon nanotube interconnects, arrays of plasmonic nanoparticles and surface plasmon-polariton waveguides. Starting from the electrodynamic models describing such structures, the performances in terms of latency and decay lengths are compared.