Surface-dominated conductance scaling in Weyl semimetal NbAs
arxiv(2022)
摘要
Protected surface states arising from non-trivial bandstructure topology in
semimetals can potentially enable new device functionalities in compute,
memory, interconnect, sensing, and communication. This necessitates a
fundamental understanding of surface-state transport in nanoscale topological
semimetals. Here, we investigate quantum transport in a prototypical
topological semimetal NbAs to evaluate the potential of this class of materials
for beyond-Cu interconnects in highly-scaled integrated circuits. Using density
functional theory (DFT) coupled with non-equilibrium Green's function (NEGF)
calculations, we show that the resistance-area RA product in NbAs films
decreases with decreasing thickness at the nanometer scale, in contrast to a
nearly constant RA product in ideal Cu films. This anomalous scaling originates
from the disproportionately large number of surface conduction states which
dominate the ballistic conductance by up to 70
show that this favorable RA scaling persists even in the presence of surface
defects, in contrast to RA sharply increasing with reducing thickness for films
of conventional metals, such as Cu, in the presence of surface defects. These
results underscore the promise of topological semimetals like NbAs as future
back-end-of-line (BEOL) interconnect metals.
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