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Online isolation of defects in cellular nanocomputers

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Abstract

Unreliability will be a major issue for computers built from components at nanometer scales. Thus, it’s to be expected that such computers will need a high degree of defect-tolerance to overcome components’ defects which have arisen during the process of manufacturing. This paper presents a novel approach to defect-tolerance that is especially geared towards nanocomputers based on asynchronous cellular automata. According to this approach, defective cells are detected and isolated by small configurations that move around randomly in cellular space. These configurations, called random flies, will attach to configurations that are static, which is typical for configurations that contain defective cells. On the other hand, dynamic configurations, like those that conduct computations, will not be isolated from the rest of the cellular space by the random flies, and will be able to continue their operations unaffectedly.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Devision of Computer Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, University of Hyogo, Himeji, 671-2280, Japan

    Teijiro Isokawa, Shin’ya Kowada, Naotake Kamiura & Nobuyuki Matsui

  2. Nano ICT Group, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Tokyo, 184-8795, Japan

    Ferdinand Peper

Authors
  1. Teijiro Isokawa
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  2. Shin’ya Kowada
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  3. Ferdinand Peper
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  4. Naotake Kamiura
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  5. Nobuyuki Matsui
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Teijiro Isokawa.

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Isokawa, T., Kowada, S., Peper, F. et al. Online isolation of defects in cellular nanocomputers. Front. Comput. Sc. China 1, 397–406 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-007-0038-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-007-0038-8

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