Researchers from HP Labs plan to publish a paper this month that outlines how it may become possible to substantially increase the performance of certain types of chips, and reduce their power consumption, by replacing the communication wires inside chips with a crossbar grid of nanowires.

By removing the traditional interconnects, the size of a given chip would naturally and drastically shrink. Performance would increase, but the chips could still be made out of traditional transistors. Cost would ideally decline because the advance wouldn’t require investing billions of dollars in new semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Power consumption would likely fall at the same time.