Programmable Nanocontrollers For Nanodevices

Advances in nanotechnology have made it possible to assemble nanostructures into a wide range of micrometer-scale sensors, actuators, and other novel devices... and to place thousands of such devices on a single chip. Most of these devices can benefit from intelligent control, but the control often requires full programmability for each device’s controller. Routing thousands of signals off-chip is not practical, but neither are conventional microcontroller designs able to be made small enough to be paired with each of the thousands of devices on-chip. This paper outlines an approach toward achieving the goal of building fully programmable controllers with circuit complexity low enough to allow each nanotechnology-based device to be accompanied by its own nanocontroller.