Analysis of defect tolerance in molecular electronics using information-theoretic measures

Molecular electronics such as silicon nanowires (NW) and carbon nanotubes (NT) are considered to be the fabric of next generation nanocomputing. However, the excessive defects caused by bottom-up self-assembly fabrication have become a fundamental obstacle for achieving reliable computation in molecular systems. In this paper, we present an information-theoretic approach to investigate the intrinsic relationship between defect tolerance and inherence redundancy in molecular crossbar systems. By modeling molecular crossbar systems as an information processing medium, we determine the information transfer capacity, which can be interpreted as the upper bound on reliability that a molecular crossbar can achieve. The proposed method allows us to evaluate the effectiveness of redundancy-based defect tolerance in a quantitative manner.