Engineers at the University of California, Riverside, have demonstrated prototype devices made of an exotic material that can conduct a current density 50 times greater than conventional copper interconnect technology. Current density is the amount of electrical current per cross-sectional area at a given point. As transistors in integrated circuits become smaller and smaller, they need higher and higher current densities to perform at the desired level. Most conventional electrical conductors, such as copper, tend to break due to overheating or other factors at high current densities, presenting a barrier to creating increasingly small components. The electronics industry needs alternatives to silicon and copper that can sustain extremely high current densities at sizes of just a few nanometers. The advent of graphene resulted in a massive, worldwide effort directed at investigation of other two-dimensional, or 2D, layered materials that would meet the need for nanoscale electronic components that can sustain a high current density. Read More…
