Collaborative Research: FuSe: Interconnects with Co-Designed Materials, Topology, and Wire Architecture

Nontechnical description: This interdisciplinary research project focuses on the synthesis of new materials which have a high electrical conductivity for small wires. This is important because more powerful and energy-efficient computers require smaller wires to connect the switches (transistors) as well as the memory elements. The key idea is to use a new type of materials for which electrons cannot be scattered at the wire surfaces. The project discovers such new materials and develops methods for their synthesis and integration into computer chip manufacturing, facilitating more powerful and energy-efficient chips used in devices ranging from smartphones to large data centers. The project includes a multifaceted education and workforce development initiative, involving education leaders from Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority Serving Institutions, scientists from research intensive universities, and development engineers from companies in the semiconductor industry. These initiatives are designed to increase diversity, quality, and quantity of the USA-based semiconductor chip manufacturing workforce. Technical description: This project aims to control the synthesis of new high-conductivity electrical interconnect materials and to co-design the conductor materials with the back-end dielectric to achieve a conductivity advantage over existing Cu technology in future integrated circuits. This involves exploiting scattering-immune surface transport in topological metals, tuning their Fermi level through strain and dielectric engineering for maximum topological effects, and achieving crystal orientation/chirality control for high conductivity in topological and anisotropic metals. The project uses a tight integration of complementary novel synthesis methods, high-throughput characterization, ab-initio electron transport calculations, as well as strain, dielectric and contact engineering. More specifically, it includes synthesis of topological and directional interconnect conductors using complementary techniques to prototype several classes of materials for the future semiconductor industry, co-design crystal growth orientation and chirality with electron transport to leverage favorable conduction including scattering-immune unidirectional surface transport in Weyl semimetals, and tuning of the Fermi level to Weyl nodes by elastic strain. This project is co-funded by the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP), which provides awards to strengthen STEM undergraduate education and research at HBCUs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.