On Sat, 27 Jun 1998 Michael Nielsen <mnielsen@tangelo.phys.unm.edu> Wrote:
>Our solid state computing devices have error rates in the 10^{-18}
>range, while single particle systems are lucky to get down to 10^{-2}.
I don't know what you mean by "single particle systems", or where you got
that figure.
>Could you please send me a reference to Merkle's work on this?
Drexler discuses Merkle's work on pages 82-85 in Nanosystems, he also lists
many other articles by Merkle and others in the field of Reversible Computers.
There is also a very recent article you may want to look at, in the June 12
1998 issue of the journal Science there is an article by James R Heath and
his associates at Hewlett Packard called "A Defect Tolerant Computer
Architecture; Opportunities for Nanotechnology". They built a parallel
computer out of slow cheap defective chips, their machine had an ridiculously
leisurely clock rate of only 1 Meg and had an estimated 220,000 hardware
defects, yet the computer was reliable and was 100 times faster than a high
end work station. They specifically say in the article that their new design
"has significant implications for any future nanometer scale computational
paradigm".
John K Clark johnkc@well.com
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