Normal vision is based on more than one hundred million receptors in each eye, but it is impossible to squeeze that many electrodes into a tiny device that has to lay on the retina, said John Wyatt, a professor in the department of electrical engineering at MIT who has been working on a retinal prosthesis since 1988.

WSJ: The Quest to Create A Bionic Eye Gets Clearer

The unreliability - or "statistical variability" - of chips is a problem that many researchers were trying to deal with, said Professor Asen Asenov from the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Glasgow.

BBC: Mistakes in silicon chips to help boost computer power

"For what it was invented for, the mouse does a good job, " said John Elias, co-inventor of the MultiTouch system and a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Delaware.

BBC: Handy future for gesture sensor