Stochastic assembly of sublithographic nanoscale interfaces

We describe a technique for addressing individual nanoscale wires with microscale control wires without using lithographic-scale processing to define nanoscale dimensions. Such a scheme is necessary to exploit sublithographic nanoscale storage and computational devices. Our technique uses modulation doping to address individual nanowires and self-assembly to organize them into nanoscale-pitch decoder arrays. We show that if coded nanowires are chosen at random from a sufficiently large population, we can ensure that a large fraction of the selected nanowires have unique addresses. For example, we show that N lines can be uniquely addressed over 99% of the time using no more than ┌2.2log₂(N)┐+11 address wires. We further show a hybrid decoder scheme that only needs to address N=O(W_litho-pitch/W_nano-pitch) wires at a time through this stochastic scheme; as a result, the number of unique codes required for the nanowires does not grow with decoder size. We give an O(N²) procedure to discover the addresses which are present. We also demonstrate schemes that tolerate the misalignment of nanowires which can occur during the self-assembly process.