We describe a technique for addressing individual nanoscale wires with micro-scale control wires without using lithographic-scale processing to define nanoscale dimensions. Such a scheme is necessary to exploit sublithographic nanoscale storage and computational devices. Our technique uses modulation doping to address individual nanowires and self-assembly to organize them into nanoscale-pitch decoder arrays. We show that if coded nanowires are chosen at random from a sufficiently large population, we can ensure that a large fraction of the selected nanowires have unique addresses. For example, we show that N lines can be uniquely addressesd over 99% of the time using no more than 2.2log2(N))+11 address wires. We further show a hybrid decoder scheme that only needs to address N=O(Wlitho_pitch/Wnano_pitch) wires at a time through this stochastic scheme; as a result, the number of unique codes required for the nanowires does not grow with decoder size. We give an O(N2) procedure to discover the addresses which are present. We also demonstrate schemes which tolerate the misalignment of nanowires which can occur during the self-assembly process.
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