Molecular Electronics: Defect Tolerance, Chemical Fabrication and Quantum-State Switching

Economic and physics considerations indicate that the rapid improvements we have come to expect in silicon integrated circuits may saturate around the year 2010. However, fundamental physical laws indicate that it should be possible to compute with a power efficiency that is at least one billion times better than present transistor electronics. The most straightforward ways currently known to achieve such efficiencies are to fabricate circuits with much smaller dimensions and fewer transistors. Thus, there is a tremendous business incentive and scientific challenge to invent new electronic devices that will have dimensions of the order of nanometers and new fabrication techniques that can inexpensively produce and connect these devices in vast quantities. In order to satisfy both requirements simultaneously, we have assembled a trans-disciplinary team of chemists, physicists, engineers and computer scientists at HP Labs to explore the use of molecules as active electronic devices in specially designed defect-tolerant architectures that are assembled by chemical processes.