From "Bart the Fink" in season 7...

Krusty (to Bart): Bah. What good is respect without the moolah to back it up. Everywhere I go I see teachers driving Ferraris, research scientists drinking champagne.

This is a research idea that MAY be useful, the demise of CMOS silicon has been highly exaggerated.

From the summary:

"an inverter, which was able to switch on and off 500,000 times per second" -> 500kHz is not so great

"however, began to break down after 2 billion cycles" or about 1 second at current processor speeds. That increases to 4000 seconds at 500kHz, or a little more than an hour.

Also, we can put billions of error free transistors on a chip for a few dollars. THAT is the real hurdle that nothing else has been able to clear yet. We will likely be with silicon for a while after it stops shrinking for this reason.
   

not sure about "eFUSE" specifically, but the fuses on chips are used to write permanent data to a chip after manufacturing, typically during testing. If this is being done in the field and is un-doable, then it is most likely some non-volatile memory that they are calling "eFUSE". I'd bet that the firmware makes it look like a fuse except under certain circumstances.

Actual fuses in chips are thin pieces of metal wire that connect to the power supply voltage. When you try to read the voltage, that connection gives you a logic "1". To blow the fuse, you use a higher power supply than you would normally use and run enough current through the thin wire so that it melts and breaks the connection. Then, when you try to read back that bit it will read a logic "0" for ever. This is very handy for encryption, calibration data, and manufacturing information such as lot# and chip location. Many years back, IIRC, Intel tried to put serial numbers on their CPUs that could be read back by the software. They backed off after some public outcry. This used the fuses described above.