Designing Reliable Systems Using Unreliable Components

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Project ID: 0737655Title: SGER Designing Reliable Systems Using Unreliable ComponentsPI name: Chris MyersInstitution: University of UtahIt is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain Moore's Law and produce faster computer chips each year. This is largely due to the fact that as transistors get smaller, they become more unreliable. As we move into the nanotechnology era, this problem will become even worse. Current approaches to deal with these problems are extremely power hungry. There is, however, proof that there are better approaches in that biological systems achieve amazing power efficiency with extremely noisy and unreliable components.For example, the human inner ear is capable of performing the equivalent of one billion floating point operations per second while consuming only 14 microwatts of power. This performance is comparable to that of a game console with a processor that burns about 50 watts of power. Therefore, the goal of this project is to draw inspiration from biological systems in order to develop new design methods and tools for designing reliable systems using unreliable components. This work will target the design of systems constructed from both traditional silicon transistors as well as new nanotechnology devices. In addition, we plan to apply these techniques to synthetic biological devices. This area of research holds the promise of designing bacteria to construct complex natural products for medical use, areas of toxic waste management, or even detect and kill tumor cells.