The amazing memristor -beyond digital computing

[Dave76]

The amazing memristor - beyond Moore's law and beyond digital computing

Hewlett-Packard's researchers see an amazing future for the memristor - a very real, near mythical electronic component...

I recently visited HP Labs and spoke with Stan Williams, senior fellow at Hewlett-Packard and director of Quantum Science Research, about an incredible semiconductor device — the memristor.

Until fairly recently, the memristor, short for memory resistor, was a mythical electronic component. It had been predicted to exist by a mathematician, Leon Chua, a professor at UC Berkeley, in an 1971 paper. No one had made a memristor until Stan Williams and his team cracked it in 2008.

The memristor can:

- store data like DRAM or Flash but it doesn’t require any energy to maintain the data storage.

- the memristor chips can be laid down in layer upon layer upon layer, creating three-dimensional structures that can store and process data.

- the memristor is easy to make and completely compatible with today’s CMOS chip making processes.

- it can be scaled to very small geometries without losing its properties.

- the memristor can also perform logic, it can act as a microprocessor!

It’s that quality of a memristor, that it can be used for both data storage and data processing that Mr WIlliams and his team recently discovered, and that potentially turns the world of computing on its head. This is a very big deal indeed.

More...


From Lab to Fab – An HP Labs discovery demonstrates the viability – and versatility – of memristor technology

Hewlett Packard outlines computer memory of the future

 

[Win7User512]

Exciting. Will be interesting to see what happens next.

 

[sygnus21]

I remember them talking about memristor a few years back. Would be nice to see it in play now. Sounds very promising for the future of computers and electronics in general.

 

[Dave76]

Would be pretty amazing to replace CPU, RAM and storage with one module.

Hopefully would be easy to OC