Semiconductor Self-help

The tiny transistors in microprocessors and other chips fail all the time. Of course, you rarely notice the effects, because they are loaded with redundancy as a contingency plan against it occuring – one little circuit snuffs, there’s a few others to take its place. Naturally, that doesn’t make them any cheaper to make. Self-repairing chips would need less extra circuitry on board, relying instead on clever ways of rerouting their architecture to avoid failures.