[Golden Eagle]

R. Stanley Williams, a Hewlett-Packard physicist, said this week that his group had begun manufacturing prototypes of a silicon chip that combines both conventional microelectronics and molecular scale components.

So this is another one of those articles where IBM got the headlines but HP is actually ahead on the technology?

[amchugh]

Good question. R. Stanley Williams is a HP fellow, and if you look at his research page I think (not that I'm a molecular physicist) that he's talking about nanoscale molecular structures rather than atomic level switches. Still impressive, but a different scale all together. If he was building the devices that the IBM researchers are talking about he'd probably be ten or fifteen years ahead on technology.

What's interesting about his research and IBM's research (and the reason he's using an FPGA) is that both technologies will require highly defect tolerant architectures. The initial few years at least of self-assembling nanomolecular components will involve several percent defects. This would cripple one of today's conventional chips, but an FPGA could be programmed to route around defects (given a sophisticated enough algorithm?)