Little chips promise big power

Researchers from Hewlett-Packard and the University of California, Los Angeles, have received a patent for a technology they claim will turn out nanochips that could be used to build very small, very powerful computers. The patent was for an electrochemical process that would let designers divide a nanochip into different sets of subcircuitry, each of which could function independently and conduct a different set of calculations. This would let the chip handle multiple functions as efficiently as traditional integrated circuits.