Performance analysis of irradiation induced defected mixed CNT bundle based coupled VLSI interconnects Manvi Sharma 1, * , Mayank Kumar Rai 1 , and Rajesh Khanna 1 1 Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, Patiala 147004, India Received: 20 May 2020 Accepted: 13 October 2020 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 ABSTRACT In this paper, a comparative study between irradiation-induced defected mixed carbon nanotube bundle (MCB) and copper based interconnects concerning functional crosstalk as well as dynamic crosstalk, at the far end of both aggressor and victim lines, are presented at 14 nm technology node for a temperature range (300 K-500 K). Four different structures of MCB namely ST-1, ST-2, ST-3 and ST-4 are taken for the analysis. If the temperature increases from 300 to 500 K, each structure of MCB with irradiation-induced defect is showing larger propagation delay as compared to defect-free MCB structures. Due to irradiation-induced defect, there is a considerable increase in crosstalk induced noise peak and duration in every MCB structure. The results further reveal that crosstalk-induced noise voltage peaks of the victim output are found to be larger in copper as compared to MCB. Also, the ST-4, considering with defect(WD) and without defect(WOD), has smaller crosstalk induced delay and time duration with higher noise voltage peaks of the victim output pulse among other structures of MCB. Moreover, the crosstalk-induced delay of coupled interconnects of the best structure of MCB (i.e. ST-4), considering irradiation- induced defect, is evaluated using the temperature-dependent (TD) and tem- perature-independent (TID) circuit models at different interconnect lengths (200 lm–1000 lm). 1 Introduction In the past decade, there has been an accelerated expansion of technology scaling in the deep sub-mi- cron (DSM) regime, which has resulted in the poor performance of copper interconnects in terms of of delay, power and crosstalk in strong inversion oper- ating region [1–5]. Therefore, to address these issues effectively, defect-free carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are considered more reliable and suitable than copper interconnects because of the reason that CNTs have the capability of carrying high current. They possess stability in terms of thermal as well as mechanical and also exhibit good thermal conductivity [6–10]. CNT, better known as rolled-up graphene sheet, is categorized as semiconducting and metallic. Address correspondence to E-mail: manvi.sharma@thapar.edu https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-020-04670-3 J Mater Sci: Mater Electron