NER: Designing Reliable Computers Using Molecular Nanotechnology

最近在物理、化学和材料科学领域的研究工作，已经利用复杂的制造技术，用奇异的材料制造出了纳米级的结构。然而，在计算机工程中，很少有人研究如何用这些新设备构建全尺寸的计算机系统。这个探索性项目的目标是开始开发用分子纳米器件构建有限状态机（FSMs）的新技术。fsm是任何数字计算系统的基本组成部分之一。在这个项目中，我们引入纳米盒作为一种可能的抽象，用于构建可靠的有限状态机，用于分子计算机系统。分子纳米器件的可靠性和误差特性与传统硅基CMOS晶体管的相应特性有很大不同。这些纳米器件的特性给计算机设计人员提出了新的挑战，这将需要一种全新的方法来设计有限状态机。我们开发的技术最终可以用来用分子纳米器件构建整个计算机系统。这是一个高风险/高回报的项目。风险在于，我们需要从大量仍在开发中的设备中开发出设计计算机的新方法。通过观察新开发的分子器件的共同趋势，我们假设它们的驱动能力弱，性质不稳定。虽然我们期望能够将传统的空间、时间和信息冗余技术用于分子计算机的容错新领域，但开发合适的解决方案需要新的思路。然而，这个项目是高回报的，因为通过将计算机体系结构研究与纳米器件本身的研究结合起来，我们将简化开发过程，从而能够比等待纳米器件研究固化更快地拥有功能齐全的分子计算机。此外，当我们为分子纳米器件量身定制我们的技术时，我们的技术也将适用于量子纳米器件和纳米级传统cmos器件的错误检测和校正，这些器件随着晶体管尺寸的缩小而变得越来越容易出错。该项目将对教育和人力资源发展作出重大贡献。它将启动一名电气和计算机工程博士生的论文研究，将他们的研究集中在这个新的领域。我们也希望让一些硕士学生参与这项工作，并可能通过明尼苏达大学现有的实习项目为本科生提供研究机会。

David LiljaU Minnesota0210197Recent work in physics, chemistry, and materials science hasproduced nanometer-scale structures out of exotic materials usingsophisticated fabrication techniques. However, very little work hasbeen conducted in computer engineering to investigate how to buildfull-scale computer systems out of these new devices.The goal of this exploratory project is to begin to develop newtechniques for constructing finite state machines (FSMs) out ofmolecular nanodevices. FSMs are one of the fundamental buildingblocks of any digital computing system. In this project, weintroduce NanoBoxes as a possible abstraction for constructingreliable finite state machines for use in molecular computersystems.The reliability and error characteristics of molecular nanodevicesare substantially different from the corresponding characteristicsof traditional silicon-based CMOS transistors. These nanodevicecharacteristics present new challenges to computer designers whichwill require an entirely new approach for designing finite statemachines. The techniques we develop eventually could be used tobuild entire computer systems out of molecular nanodevices.This is a high-risk/high-reward project. The risk is that we needto develop new approaches for designing computers out of a largecollection of devices which are still under development themselves.By observing common trends in newly developed molecular devices, wemake assumptions about their weak drive capabilities and theirunstable nature. While we expect that we can adapt and extendtraditional space, time, and information redundancy techniques forfault-tolerance into this new domain of molecular computers, newideas will be necessary to develop appropriate solutions.This project is high-reward, however, since by conducting computerarchitecture research in tandem with research on the nanodevicesthemselves, we will be streamlining the development process to beable to have fully-functional molecular computers more quickly thanif we wait for the nanodevice research to solidify. Furthermore,while we are tailoring our techniques for molecular nanodevices, ourtechniques also will be applicable to error detection and correctionin quantum nanodevices and in nanometer-scale conventional CMOSdevices, which are becoming more fault-prone as transistor sizesshrink.This project will make substantial contributions to educational andhuman resource development. It will initiate the dissertationresearch of a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineeringto focus their research in this new area. We also expect to involvea few M.S. students in this work and possibly provide researchopportunities for undergraduate students through existing internshipprograms at the University of Minnesota.