Memristor update

HP Labs is making memristor news again. From a news item on physorg.ocm,

HP is partnering with Korean memory chip maker Hynix Semiconductor Inc. to make chips that contain memristors. Memristors are a newly discovered building block of electrical circuits.

HP built one in 2008 that confirmed what scientists had suspected for nearly 40 years but hadn’t been able to prove: that circuits have a weird, natural ability to remember things even when they’re turned off.

I don’t remember the story quite that way, i.e.,  “confirmed what scientists had suspected for nearly 40 years” as I recall the theory that R. Stanley William (the HP Labs team leader) cites  is from Dr. Leon Chua circa 1971 and was almost forgotten. (Unbeknownst to Dr. Chua, there was a previous theorist in the 1960s who posited a similar notion which he called a memistor. See Memistors, Memristors, and the Rise of Strong Artificial Intelligence, an article by Blaise Mouttet, for a more complete history. ETA: There’s additional material from Blaise at http://www.neurdon.com/)

There’s more about HP Labs and its new partner at BBC News in an article by Jason Palmer,

Electronics giant HP has joined the world’s second-largest memory chip maker Hynix to manufacture a novel member of the electronics family.

The deal will see “memristors” – first demonstrated by HP in 2006 [I believe it was 2008] – mass produced for the first time.

Memristors promise significantly greater memory storage requiring less energy and space, and may eventually also be employed in processors.

HP says the first memristors should be widely available in about three years.

If you follow the link to the story, there’s also a brief BBC video interview with Stanley Williams.

My first 2010 story on the memristor is here and later, there’s an interview I had with Forrest H Bennet III who argues that the memristor is not a fourth element (in addition to the capacitor, resistor, and inductor) but is in fact part of an infinite table of circuit elements.

ETA: I have some additional information from the news release on the HP Labs website,

HP today announced that it has entered into a joint development agreement with Hynix Semiconductor Inc., a world leader in the manufacture of computer memory, to bring memristor technology to market.

Memristors represent a fourth basic passive circuit element. They existed only in theory until 2006 – when researchers in HP Labs’ Information and Quantum Systems Laboratory (IQSL) first intentionally demonstrated their existence.

Memory chips created with memristor technology have the potential to run considerably faster and use much less energy than Flash memory technologies, says Dr. Stanley Williams, HP Senior Fellow and IQSL founding Director.

“We believe that the memristor is a universal memory that over time could replace Flash, DRAM, and even hard drives,” he says.

Uniting HP’s world-class research and IP with a first-rate memory manufacturer will allow high-quality, memristor-based memory to be developed quickly and on a mass scale, Williams adds.

Also, the video interview with Dr. Williams is on youtube and is not a BBC video as I believed. So here’s the interview,

2 thoughts on “Memristor update

  1. admin

    Hi Blaise! You’re welcome and nice to see you back. Thx. so much for the link to neurdon, I think this is great research material for an article I hope to start writing by mid- to late September. Cheers, Maryse

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