Yesterday, I was speaking about companies having defective accounting books.
Today, let's talk about a company building computers with defective chips: Hewlett-Packard. The difference with WorldCom, Tyco or other companies involved in recent financial scandals is that HP wants to create something valuable about our future. Here is how.
Several years ago, Hewlett-Packard Co. built a 256-processor computer, but 220,000 of its parts were defective. HP was thrilled with the results.
The computer was built by HP Labs, HP's central research operation, using ordinary but faulty silicon chips, as part of its program in molecular computing. It proved that clever software can allow a computer to work even when many of its components are defective. That ability will be necessary for the construction of computers whose parts are so tiny that their reliability can't be assured.
"We know [that] at the molecular scale, there will be defects," says R. Stanley Williams, director of quantum science research at HP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif. "We won't attempt to build perfect circuits like Intel does."
Williams says he hopes to make a molecular processor as powerful as the Intel 4004 chip "in a few years time." (The 4004, developed in 1969, was a four-bit, 104-KHz silicon device with 2,300 transistors.) Microprocessors based on molecular-scale switches will pass silicon in capability in 10 to 15 years, Williams predicts.
Source: Gary H. Anthes, Computerworld, June 24, 2002
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