HP Introduces Defect-Tolerant Nano Elements

versicherung writes "With the ever shrinking feature size in microelectronics it will soon be prohibitively expensive to manufacture defect-free nano elements. HP has come up with a new way to produce fault-tolerant microchips. Utilizing mathematical techniques borrowed from coding theory, HP will be able to produce those chips by using a cross-bar architecture and adding 50 percent more wires as an 'insurance policy,' to fabricate nano-electronic circuits with nearly perfect yields even though the probability of broken components will be high."

Comments

remember it's nano-circuits

[Anonymous Coward]

some people are questioning whether this is worth it. remember that nano-circuits are experimental and techniques like this are necessary just to make working circuits.

'crossbar architecture' is an experimental architecture that, using carbon nanotubes laid out in a grid with selectively chosen connections, allows you to perform useful functions, such as logic. HP recently (a few months ago) announced the crossbar latch, which they claim will eventually eliminate the need for transistors.

Unfortunately the technology is far from mature; it's slow, difficult to manufacture, and unreliable, although it is ridiculously small (the primary advantage). This research is an attempt to correct the problems associated with difficulty to manufacture and reliability; rather than try to make a perfect circuit using nanowires, build in some redundancy and you're fine.

Because they designed this in the last 2 months.

[attemptedgoalie]

Brilliant deduction there.

Re:At last!

[hyc]

Actually most of this work has been going on throughout Carly's reign. She took over in '99, HP's first patent on the stuff was issued in 2000.

HP Nanotech web page

And the design itself has already been covered here a few times...

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/0 1/1823256&tid=173&tid=14

The research had probably been going on long before Carly arrived. The biggest connection you could draw between the two is, she didn't axe it during her reign...

Re:More than what we are lead to believe

[Anonymous Coward]

The HP press release is meant to announce the publication of their paper in the journal Nanotechnology. For those without access to the journal, this paper was originally released as an HP tech report in 2004.

Nothing sinister here.

Re:Graceful degradation vs. constant-spec products

[mce]

Silcon circuts don't need graceful degradation, as they do not degrade in any meaningful manner once they have left the factory.

Silcon circuits most certainly do degrade over time, even in normal use. It just so happens that so far this has been "under control". But as technologists keep reducing the feature size, these effects will become much more important.

Several people in my team work in exactly this area of micro-electronics research by the way: how to optimally compensate for these (and other related) effects at the system/architecture level. Other research groups at the place where I work (we have 2 full featured cleanrooms of our own, just for research purposes) are part of the "gang" that causes these problems to grow in importance.