In 2004, the microelectronics industry quietly ushered in the Nanoelectronics Era with the mass production of sub-100nm node devices. The current leading-edge semiconductor chips in mass production - the so-called 90nm node devices - have a transistor gate length of less than 50nm. This rapid technological advancement in the semiconductor industry has been made possible by innovations in materials employed in both transistor fabrication (front-end-of-the-line, FEOL) and interconnect fabrication (back-end-of-the-line, BEOL). The 90nm node BEOL features copper (Cu) interconnects and dielectric...