Cellular Nanocomputers: A Focused Review

Research into nanocomputer architectures have increasingly attracted attention in recent years, driven by the realization that improvements in integration densities can only be sustained at an unchanged pace if new approaches are adopted. As top-down fabrication methods like optical lithography are gradually facing their technological and economical limits, alternatives are called for. Bottom-up fabrication methods are still in their early stages of development, but, being based on the self-assembling properties inherent in molecules, they offer much promise for nanocomputers. With expected changes in fabrication method, there will also be changes in the architectures of the resulting computers: it is unlikely that the complicated structures of von Neumann computer architectures can be produced by top-down methods in the nanometer-scale regime. Rather, future computers are expected to ABSTRACT