Tungsten provides the minimum resistance path for nanoscale interconnects

       As microchips become smaller, the size of their interconnects with copper shrinks, leading to an increase in resistivity at the nanoscale. Addressing this emerging technology bottleneck is a major problem in the semiconductor industry.

By changing the crystal orientation of the interconnect material to reduce the resistivity, there is a good hope to solve the problem. Two researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have carried out electron transport measurements in epitaxial single crystal tungsten (W), a potential solution. They carried out the first principles simulation and found the orientation dependent effect. And they found that the anisotropic effect of resistivity is most pronounced between the layers with two specific orientations of the lattice structure, namely W (001) and W (110). The work is also published this week in the Journal of applied physics.