Investigation of multi-walled carbon nanotube-based structures for high density integrated capacitors

The development of high density integrated capacitors is crucial for the implementation of high performance mixed-signal integrated circuits in VLSI applications. In this paper, we investigate three possible high density integrated capacitor configurations based on multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT). We develop an RLC model for the MWCNT-based capacitor configurations and examine the design trade-off between capacitance per area and losses due to parasitic resistance and inductance. The results indicate that the proposed MWCNT-based capacitor configurations can potentially offer orders of magnitude larger capacitance per area and comparable quality factors to traditional metal-based integrated capacitors, which will enable more compact mixed-signal systems with greater performance. This study highlights the performance and capacitive density limits of MWCNT-based capacitors.