Chris Dwyer, Duke University

Abstract

The migration of circuit fabrication technology from the microscale to the nanoscale has generated a great deal of interest in how the fundamental physical limitations of materials will change the way we engineer computer systems. The changing relationships between performance, defects, and cost have motivated research into technologies that may overcome these challenges. This talk will present the theory, design, and methods for the DNA self-assembly of nanostructures within the context of circuit fabrication. The advantages of this technology go beyond the simple scaling of device feature sizes (sub-20nm) to enable new modes of computation that are impractical under the constraints of conventional fabrication methods. A brief survey of several computer architectures that can take advantage of this new technology and progress toward self-assembled computing logic will also be presented.

Bio

Dwyer received his B.S. in computer engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 1998, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2000 and 2003, respectively. He worked in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at UNC as a Postdoctoral Fellow and the Department of Computer Science at Duke as a Visiting Assistant Professor from 2003-2004. Dwyer joined the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Duke University as an Assistant Professor in 2004.