Tag Archives: Fabio Traversa

Memristors, memcapacitors, and meminductors for faster computers

While some call memristors a fourth fundamental component alongside resistors, capacitors, and inductors (as mentioned in my June 26, 2014 posting which featured an update of sorts on memristors [scroll down about 80% of the way]), others view memristors as members of an emerging periodic table of circuit elements (as per my April 7, 2010 posting).

It seems scientists, Fabio Traversa, and his colleagues fall into the ‘periodic table of circuit elements’ camp. From Traversa’s  June 27, 2014 posting on nanotechweb.org,

Memristors, memcapacitors and meminductors may retain information even without a power source. Several applications of these devices have already been proposed, yet arguably one of the most appealing is ‘memcomputing’ – a brain-inspired computing paradigm utilizing the ability of emergent nanoscale devices to store and process information on the same physical platform.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain, the University of California San Diego and the University of South Carolina in the US, and the Polytechnic of Turin in Italy, suggest a realization of “memcomputing” based on nanoscale memcapacitors. They propose and analyse a major advancement in using memcapacitive systems (capacitors with memory), as central elements for Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) circuits capable of storing and processing information on the same physical platform. They name this architecture Dynamic Computing Random Access Memory (DCRAM).

Using the standard configuration of a Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) where the capacitors have been substituted with solid-state based memcapacitive systems, they show the possibility of performing WRITE, READ and polymorphic logic operations by only applying modulated voltage pulses to the memory cells. Being based on memcapacitors, the DCRAM expands very little energy per operation. It is a realistic memcomputing machine that overcomes the von Neumann bottleneck and clearly exhibits intrinsic parallelism and functional polymorphism.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Dynamic computing random access memory by F L Traversa, F Bonani, Y V Pershin, and M Di Ventra. Nanotechnology Volume 25 Number 28  doi:10.1088/0957-4484/25/28/285201 Published 27 June 2014

This paper is behind a paywall.