ABSTRACT
Interconnect refers to the metal wires that make electrical connections between the transistors on a die. Aluminum and copper are commonly used as interconnect metals, but doped polysilicon is also used in some situations. Interconnect has attracted increasing attention over the last few years because of its growing influence on the overall performance of digital integrated circuits.1-4 This has come about by the scaling of device dimensions coupled with the trend to larger die sizes. Currently, microprocessors contain about 1 km of interconnect for every square centimeter of die area.
