The above quotation is taken from an essay titled “Computing with
Molecules” written by Mark Reed and James Tour in 2002. The quote clearly
shows that as computer engineers we are at a technological and scientific inflection
point. However, the advent of nanotechnology might be the recourse
for continuing improvement of our computing power. Computer engineers
and scientists face new challenges as nano-technological innovations grow in
different fields of science and technology. As industry experts argue on the
scaling of Moore’s law beyond 2015, one fact is certain about the future of
electronics: The certainty is in the uncertainty germane in the size, nature, and
physics of electronic devices on which we will build our future computing and
communications infrastructures.

One of the grand challenges in the nano-scopic computing era is guarantees
of robustness. Robust computing system design is confronted with quantum
physical, probabilistic, and even biological phenomena, and guaranteeing high
reliability is much more difficult than ever before. Scaling devices down to the
level of single electron operation will bring forth new challenges due to probabilistic
effects and uncertainty in guaranteeing ‘zero-one’ based computing.
Minuscule devices imply billions of devices on a single chip, which may help
mitigate the challenge of uncertainty by replication and redundancy. However,
shear scale.

Much of the nanotechnology research taking place today is confined in the
domain of material science, electrical engineering, quantum and device physics,
chemistry, and even biology. However, computer engineers and scientists will
be forced to confront the effects that we described above as nanostructured
such device densities will create a design and validation nightmare with the
material with unreliable and defective substrates begin to enter into the main
stream of computer design.