April 9, 2009
An electrical engineer professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has been offered a multi-million dollar grant for research into transistors.
Over four years, Ali Hajimiri will receive $6 million (£4.09 million) from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to research a "self-healing" circuit, which works around defective transistors instead of relying on all of them to be working.
Mr Hajimiri has said that his idea for the design of transistor systems was taken from nature and that he was "inspired by biological systems that constantly heal themselves in the presence of random and intentional failures".
The research aims to continue the effects of Moores Law, which states that the number of transistors fitted onto an integrated circuit increase exponentially, with chips getting smaller while processing speeds get faster.
If the research is successful, it will negate recent comments by IBM fellow Carl Anderson, who said at the International Symposium on Physical Design 2009 that Moores Law no longer applied to semiconductor chips, according to the EETimes.
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