Warren Robinett invented Easter Eggs hidden in computer games when he hid a famous first one in his Atari Adventure. He writes now to tell us about his publication of some of the results of his nanotechnology research, “Defect-tolerant interconnect to nanoelectronic circuits: internally redundant demultiplexers based on error-correcting codes.”

Got that?

If not, Warren explains a bit:

If the abstract doesn’t quite make sense to you, some context is that a “crossbar” is a very small circuit structure we can fabricate where one set of parallel wires crosses another set of parallel wires. A bit can be stored at each junction, so that the crossbar can act as an extremely high-density memory. Our group at HP has made wires as narrow as 6 atoms wide (2 nanometers wide). A problem we have with stuff this small is that there are sure to be defects in what we fabricate, and the paper is about a defect-tolerance technique — a way to make the crossbars such that they will work in spite of having a lot of defects present. The “demultiplexer” the paper talks about is a kind of digital circuit needed to select individual bits in the memory being accessed.