Teramac: pointing the way to real-world nanotechnology

Researchers say that the ability to grow molecular sized electronic components-already being produced in research labs around the world-is expected to reach commercial economic and technical feasibility around the same time CMOS technology reaches its physical or economic limit (around 2010). A major goal of nanoscale technology is to build systems that incorporate a huge number of computational devices (researchers speak in terms of a mole, approximately 6/spl times/10/sup 23/). How will tomorrow's computer architects achieve the organization that allows the entire mass of devices to operate efficiently? Chemically assembled machines will certainly have to reproduce the arbitrary complexity that general purpose computation demands. Teramac, an experimental configurable computer built at the HP Lab, has demonstrated a viable solution to this problem. The powerful computer was originally designed to test different parallel computing architectures in the mid '90s, but has proven that a massively defect tolerant computer-that accommodates the uncertainty of "grown" computing devices-can be built.