The evolution and maturity of the CMOS process has heralded new devices with ever shrinking device geometries and higher integration densities. This, however, also gives us more challenging problems to overcome to take full advantage of the new effects that manifest themselves in the nanoscale zone. Design paradigms from the biological domain offer an insight into how we can better utilize the millions (and potentially, billions) of transistors in the evolving new fabrics to design and build large systems.