Analysis of Defect Tolerance in Molecular Crossbar Electronics

Abstract

Molecular electronics such as silicon nanowires (NW) and carbon nanotubes (CNT) demonstrate great potential for continuing the technology advances toward future nano-computing paradigm. However, excessive defects from bottom-up stochastic assembly have emerged as a fundamental obstacle for achieving reliable computation using molecular electronics. In this paper, we present an information-theoretic approach to investigate the intrinsic relationship between defect tolerance and inherence redundancy in molecular crossbar systems. By modeling defect-prone molecular crossbars as a non-ideal information processing medium, we determine the information transfer capacity, which can be interpreted as the bound on reliability that a molecular crossbar system can achieve. The proposed method allows us to evaluate the effectiveness of redundancy-based defect tolerance in a quantitative manner. Employing this method, we derive the gap of reliability between redundancy-based defect tolerance and ideal defect-free molecular systems. We also show the implications to the related design optimization problem.