A recipe for Moore’s Law has been found: silicon is “seasoned” with graphene and baked at 300 °C

The reduction in technological processes for producing chips has almost reached physical limits. Copper, which has shown itself to be an excellent wiring device between transistors, began to provide increasing resistance to the current as the cross-section of the wires was further reduced. Potentially, it can be replaced by graphene. The problem is that modern technologies for depositing graphene on chips are incompatible with the CMOS processes used for mass production of chips. Perhaps a solution to this problem has been found.

Image source: AI generation Kandinsky 3.1/3DNews

Previously proposed technologies for depositing carbon on microcircuits (transistors) to create graphene conducting lines involve the use of high temperatures – from 400 °C and above. Such temperatures are detrimental to silicon transistors manufactured using CMOS technology. A different method of applying graphene to a chip is needed, and this method was invented by the American company Destination 2D. It is worth noting that the scientific consultant of Destination 2D is Konstantin Novoselov, one of the 2010 Nobel Prize winners in physics and co-author of the research that led to the discovery of graphene in 2004.

The technology proposed by Destination 2D for applying graphene to chips is carried out in a gas environment under pressure from 410 to 550 kPa. Deposition occurs not on a “bare” chip, but on a nickel film previously deposited on the crystal. Nickel acts as a consumable material and is subsequently removed from the surface of the crystal. The introduction of this stage into the technical process made it possible to reduce the graphene deposition temperature to 300 °C acceptable for CMOS. At this temperature, the transistor structures on the chip are not destroyed, and the connection pattern is formed using graphene.

Also, researchers from Destination 2D solved the problem of increasing the conductive properties of graphene. It is claimed that the company’s special method of doping graphene – the intercalation method – makes it 100 times more conductive than copper. This allows you to maintain and even increase the current density as the size of the transistors decreases, which means it remains possible to increase the density of their placement on the chip. Moreover, the developers claim that thanks to intercalation, the conductivity of graphene increases as the size of the elements decreases, which gives a chance to extend the operation of Moore’s law for several more years.

Destination 2D management believes that it will not be long before the graphene process they propose will be introduced into the production of advanced microcircuits. The company is actively cooperating with a number of chip manufacturers to bring this point closer.