Defect-tolerant molecular electronics

The integrated circuit, manufactured by optical lithography, has driven the computer revolution for three decades. If we are to continue to build complex systems of ever-smaller components, we must find a new technology that will allow massively parallel construction of electronic circuits at the atomic scale. Our Hewlett-Packard and University of California research team is currently developing the molecular electronics building blocks and computer aided design algorithms for a defect-tolerant reconfigurable architecture which allows one to electrically download the designed complexity of a computer into a chemically assembled regular but imperfect nanostructure.