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Abstract
Towards Nanocomputer Architecture
Paul Beckett, Andrew Jennings
School of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering
RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
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At the nanometer scale, the focus of micro-architecture will move from
processing to communication. Most general computer architectures to date
have been based on a
“stored program” paradigm that differentiates between memory and
processing and relies on communication over busses and other (relatively)
long distance mechanisms.
Nanometer-scale electronics – nanoelectronics - promises to
fundamentally change the ground-rules. Processing will be cheap and
plentiful, interconnection expensive
but pervasive. This will tend to move computer architecture in the
direction of locally-connected, reconfigurable hardware meshes that merge
processing and memory. If
the overheads associated with reconfigurability can be reduced or even
eliminated, architectures based on non-volatile, reconfigurable,
finegrained meshes with rich, local
interconnect offer a better match to the expected characteristics of future
nanoelectronic devices.
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