When it comes to device interconnects, it’s hard to beat copper. Its low resistivity and high reliability have served the industry exceedingly well as both on-chip interconnect and wires between chips. But in logic chips, with interconnect stacks rising into the 14-level range and resistive-capacitive (RC) delay becoming a bigger portion of total delay, fabs are looking to alternative metals to maintain performance. Chip Greely, vice president of engineering at Promex Industries, offered insights into how manufacturing and packaging will shift over the next couple decades in this Semiconductor Engineering article.