Online isolation of defects in cellular nanocomputers

Abstract

Unreliability will be a major issue for computers built from components at nanometer scales. Thus, it’s to be expected that such computers will need a high degree of defect-tolerance to overcome components’ defects which have arisen during the process of manufacturing. This paper presents a novel approach to defect-tolerance that is especially geared towards nanocomputers based on asynchronous cellular automata. According to this approach, defective cells are detected and isolated by small configurations that move around randomly in cellular space. These configurations, called random flies, will attach to configurations that are static, which is typical for configurations that contain defective cells. On the other hand, dynamic configurations, like those that conduct computations, will not be isolated from the rest of the cellular space by the random flies, and will be able to continue their operations unaffectedly.