There may be trouble ahead [integrated circuit design]

This paper provides some strategies that can help IC designers deal with problems arising from the emergence of advanced manufacturing techniques with minimum dimensions of less than 100 nm. Many of the physical effects that could be ignored in less dense processes are now becoming painfully apparent, making design significantly more difficult and prompting some engineers to reconsider their use of the latest processes. To address this problem, one of the options is to design circuits and systems that achieve fault tolerance using redundancy and other mechanisms. Another option is to use hardware that recognizes when a circuit hasn´t performed correctly and uses a built-in recovery mechanism to get the circuit to repeat the desired operation. The availability of multiple central processing units on one chip is expected to change system design as well as significantly increase the opportunity to be constructive in defect tolerance.