These devices are partly tested and characterised in Cambridge and partly made available to the other partners in the project. A gold nanowire which was fabricated using electron beam lithography can be seen in figure 1 . The width of the wire is 50 nm. In future devices these wires will have to carry an electrical current. This puts a lot of stress on the material.
Thermal stress is one physical reason that leads to the failure of a metallic wire.
The electrons themselves exert a force on the atoms of the solid, the so called electron wind force . The combination of temperature and electromigration phenomena leads to massive recrystallisation and eventual failure of the wire as can be seen in the following movie. Of perhaps more pertinent interest was to try and gain an understanding of the practical limitations of interconnect down-scaling. A typical result is shown in fig. The wire widths are 45 and 470 nm, respectively.