  Semi-Empirical Tight Binding (TB) is known to be a scalable and accurate
atomistic representation for electron transport for realistically extended
nano-scaled semiconductor devices that might contain millions of atoms. In this
paper an environment-aware and transferable TB model suitable for electronic
structure and transport simulations in technologically relevant metals,
metallic alloys, metal nanostructures and metallic interface systems is
described. Part I of this paper describes the development and validation of the
new TB model.
  The new model incorporates intra-atomic diagonal and off-diagonal elements
for implicit self-consistency and greater transferability across bonding
environments. The dependence of the on-site energies on strain has been
obtained by appealing to the Moments Theorem that links closed electron paths
in the system to energy moments of angular momentum resolved local density of
states obtained ab-initio. The model matches self-consistent DFT electronic
structure results for bulk FCC metals with and without strain, metallic alloys,
metallic interfaces and metallic nanostructures with high accuracy and can be
used in predictive electronic structure and transport problems in metallic
systems at realistically extended length scales
