It used to be the case, said Prof Asenov, that silicon chips were identical and could be relied on to work in the same way. But as components shrink to 30 nanometres and beyond such certainty disappears.

No longer can designers expect to lay down crisp脆的，易碎的 ranks of perfectly formed transistors during manufacturing.

"Instead," he said, "designers have to introduce redundancy冗陈，备份, self-organisation and self testing."

The design and testing was done using a grid, essentially a piece of software that unites tens of thousands of PCs scattered across different sites.

Richard Sinnott, technical director at the National E-Science Centre in Glasgow, which brokers the grid resources for projects such as NanoCMO, said the team needed to use hundreds of thousands of hours of computer time.

"Prof Asenov wanted access to as much high performance computing as we could give them," he said.

His team gave them access to the number-crunching power they needed and helped them manage the huge amount of data being produced.

Over the course of a few weeks, he said, the project racked up获胜，累积 around 20 years worth of processing time as batches of hundreds of transistors were simulated.

"It's the biggest project we are involved with right now," said Mr Sinnott.

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