Self-Healing Transistors for Chip-Scale Starships

Here's where my intuition is anchored, and you can figure if it's applicable (because I worked in a very different field). In magnetron sputtering, you ionize a gas as it passes through a strong magnetic field (harddrive magnet strength). Once the molecule ionizes (since it's moving at sonic speeds in the vacuum), it whips around and slams into some target, blasting molecules back from the target like a shotgun to a pile of dirt. These sputtered molecules/bits of material may be slightly charged, and when they hit the substrate will carry that charge and deposit it onto the substrate. Over time an insulating substrate (like glass) will charge up a bit, and this will begin to repulse incomming splattered charged bits. It'd be called something like 'biasing' and slows down the deposition rate, since the incomming material may slow too much to properly embed itself on the substrate. The magnets behind the target also trap electrons (in what is often called a racetrack), which helps amplifies ionizing the gases (since a strong field may not ionize the incoming gas molecules, but plonking an extra electron onto it will).

It tends to be a game of small effects in big numbers. Any individual interaction can vary wildly from one interaction to another, but over many trillions of trillions of events it averages out like you'd expect scales similar to Avagadro's number to. So if we could fabricate stupefying amouts of these gizmos, you wouldn't need it to be completely effective; just enough biasing or field strength to tilt the odds a bit in your favor and a lot of the little chips could survive. And if you have enough, you win! Sure the solor wind may clobber a few chips, but if you have billions enough of them, perhaps enough survive to keep effective.

This is part of the approach to some MEMS gizmos, where you play the odds and make huge numbers of the gizmos with a cheap fast process and filter out the working ones. Ideally you'd be smart and just have a really good process, but if your fabrication process is messy or too hard to control and the gizmo valuable enough you can take the losses. (I mean, you don't do that - you engineer good processes! But... well, that can be expensive. And sometimes waste is cheaper.)

EDIT: I'm thinking of the spherical cow equivalent of a gizmo here, too. You prolly wouldn't make billions of little computers and hork them at another star system unless you could essentially replicate them chemically. But not with a photolithographic process typical to chip designs. You can get millions, not trillions of trillions. Have something that self-assembles in a beaker and then perhaps it becomes an option. But that's sort of like hurling a viral infection at another star system, and... well, kinda gunks the idea too.

It seems like the dominant force here is going to be the radiation pressure of the laser hitting it, at least in deep space. There isn't going to be solar wind for most of this journey, they will be past the heliosphere and in the interstellar medium. But I guess all you need is for it to be correctly oriented when it reaches the distant star?