A defect- and fault-tolerant architecture for nanocomputers

Both von Neumann's NAND multiplexing, based on a massive duplication of imperfect devices and randomized imperfect interconnects, and reconfigurable architectures have been investigated to come up with solutions for integrations of highly unreliable nanometre-scale devices. In this paper, we review these two techniques, and present a defect- and fault-tolerant architecture in which von Neumann's NAND multiplexing is combined with a massively reconfigurable architecture. The system performance of this architecture is evaluated by studying its reliability, i.e. the probability of system survival. Our evaluation shows that the suggested architecture can tolerate a device error rate of up to 10−2, with multiple redundant components; the structure is efficiently robust against both permanent and transient faults for an ultra-large integration of highly unreliable nanometre-scale devices.