SHF: Small: Nanocomputing Processes and Artifacts: Fundamental Description and Physical-Information-Theoretic Assessment

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As silicon integrated circuit technology approaches its ultimate scaling and performance limits, we can expect a rapid proliferation of innovative proposals for fundamentally new information processing technologies. The quest for the first post-CMOS general purpose computing machines will likely emphasize digital computation in systems constructed from nanoscale building blocks. Proposals for new nanocomputing technologies will, however, be dificult to evaluate, both because nanocircuits are dificult to build and test experimentally and because phenomena that compromise the reliable physical representation and manipulation of information in nanoscale systems will pose new and unfamiliar challenges. These considerations motivate the development of new theoretical tools for assessing the fundamental physical limits to reliable processing of classical information in nanoscale systems, limits that follow from generic space, time and power constraints imposed by the technological objective of superseding silicon technology at the end of scaling.This project aims to advance the fundamental physical description of digital information processing in (generally noisy and faulty) nanosystems and to develop approaches, built from such a description, that can be used to evaluate the ultimate information processing capabilities of proposed nanocomputing technologies. The first prototype assessment studies will emphasize two existing proposals---quantum-dot cellular automata and nanowire-based NASIC fabric implementations---and will integrate results from physical information theoretic analyses and physical circuit models. Other explorations will aim to provide technology-independent insights into issues of generic importance for nanocomputation, such as the physical costs of error correction. These investigations, taken together, will help to clarify the nature of fundamental physical limits in information processing and their practical consequences, which will become increasingly important as the questfor new nanocomputing technologies intensifies.