Defect Tolerant Molecular Electronics:
Algorithms, Architectures, and Atoms
Philip J. Kuekes
Computer Architect
Quantum Science Research
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
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 Science paper (James R. Heath, Philip J. Kuekes, Gregory S.
Snider and R. Stanley Williams, A Defect Tolerant Computer
Architecture: Opportunities for Nanotechnology, Science, v.280,
12 June 1998) presented 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.
Our Hewlett-Packard and University of California research team
is currently developing the molecular electronics building blocks
and CAD algorithms for such a reconfigurable technology. We have
recently demonstrated the first such building blocks (C.P. Collier,
E.W. Wong, M. Belohradsky, F.M. Raymo, J.F. Stoddart, P.J. Kuekes,
R.S. Williams and J.R. Heath, Electronically Configurable
Molecular-Based Logic Gates, Science, v.285, 16 July 1999.) The
ability of a reconfigurable architecture to create a functional
system in the presence of defective components may well change the
style of manufacturing in the coming century.
The industrial revolution started with inexpensive labor assembling
capital intensive interchangeable precision parts. Two centuries
later we may switch to supercomputer labor assembling inexpensive
chemically produced imperfect parts.
Philip J. Kuekes is a member of the technical staff at
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. He got his BS in Physics from Yale
University. He designed mega-op array processors in the 1970s and
giga-op systolic processors in the 1980s. In 1991 he joined HP
Laboratories as Project Manager for Teramac, a trillion operations
per second reconfigurable computer. Teramac has been configured to
perform DNA sequence matching, volume visualization, and MRI based
brain artery detection at 100 times workstation performance.
Teramac is the largest defect tolerant processor ever made. Three
quarters of the 864 chips in Teramac have defects. His current
research interests are at the intersection of massively parallel
computer architectures and chemistry. As a researcher in the HP
Defect Tolerant Moletronics effort, he is investigating a
reconfigurable architecture that allows one to electrically
download the designed complexity of a computer into a chemically
assembled regular but imperfect nanostructure.