Nano-copper (nano-Cu) sintering is a promising lead-free interconnection technology for advanced electronic packaging due to its high electrical conductivity. However, practical applications are hindered by oxidation and limited sintering efficiency. Carbon nanotube (CNT) doping has been proposed to modify sintering behavior by influencing diffusion and interfacial interactions. In this study, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and experiments were combined to investigate the effects of CNT doping on nano-Cu sintering and interconnection performance.Two MD models were constructed: a Cu NP–CNT dual-particle model to examine interfacial interactions, and a multi-particle model to evaluate overall sintering dynamics. Results show that Cu nanoparticle size significantly affects sintering, with 4 nm particles exhibiting optimal energy reduction at 500 K, while 2 nm particles show stronger bonding at 700 K due to partial melting. CNT doping in the multi-particle system increased defect density, improving bonding strength but compromising electrical and thermal conductivity.Experimentally, nano-Cu pastes doped with various CNT types and contents were tested. A 1 wt% CNT addition enhanced shear strength, while higher contents led to agglomeration, reduced uniformity, and degraded electrical performance. SEM revealed CNT accumulation at sintering necks, and XPS indicated potential interfacial reactions involving functional groups on CNTs.Overall, CNTs play a dual role in nano-Cu sintering—enhancing mechanical performance via defect formation but reducing conductivity due to interfacial resistance. Optimizing CNT surface chemistry and dispersion is essential to balance mechanical and electrical properties in future interconnect applications.

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects smart devices to enable various intelligent services. The deployment of IoT encounters several challenges, such as difficulties in controlling and managing IoT applications and networks, problems in programming existing IoT devices, long service provisioning time, underused resources, as well as complexity, isolation and scalability, among others. One fundamental concern is that current IoT networks lack flexibility and intelligence. A network-wide flexible control and management are missing in IoT networks. In addition, huge numbers of devices and large amounts of data are involved in IoT, but none of them have been tuned for supporting network management and control. In this paper, we argue that Software-defined Networking (SDN) together with the data generated by IoT applications can enhance the control and management of IoT in terms of flexibility and intelligence. We present a review for the evolution of SDN and IoT and analyze the benefits and challenges brought by the integration of SDN and IoT with the help of IoT data. We discuss the perspectives of knowledge-driven SDN for IoT through a new IoT architecture and illustrate how to realize Industry IoT by using the architecture. We also highlight the challenges and future research works toward realizing IoT with the knowledge-driven SDN.