Advanced θ-method for modeling crosstalk and propagation delay for multiple coupled hybrid Cu–CNT interconnects in time domain

Higher transistor density is made possible by the continuous scaling of CMOS technology, but it also brings with it serious drawbacks including increased power leakage and short-channel effects. In addition to these transistor-level issues, interconnect reliability and performance are crucial as integrated circuits shrink to the 5-nm node and beyond. Higher crosstalk, propagation delay, and signal degradation, particularly at high switching frequencies, are some of the increasing problems that traditional copper (Cu) interconnects encounter with modern CMOS technologies, such as FinFET-based 5-nm nodes. These problems frequently have a greater impact than the transistors themselves and can seriously impair system performance. With a CMOS FinFET 5-nm driver, we examine both functional and dynamic crosstalk in multi-coupled hybrid copper and carbon nanotube (Cu–CNT) interconnect architectures. Using PSpice simulations as a reference, we compare the accuracy of the proposed θ-method in the time domain to the traditional finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) methodology to describe these effects. The findings show that the θ-method provides much higher accuracy in capturing propagation delay and crosstalk, demonstrating a 2.45 × speedup over FDTD and up to 2.3 × higher accuracy than other time-domain techniques like MRTD.