Tag Archives: Paul Meuffels

2.5M Euros for Ireland’s John Boland and his memristive nanowires

The announcement makes no mention of the memristor or neuromorphic engineering but those are the areas in which  John Boland works and the reason for his 2.5M Euro research award. From the Ap. 3, 2013 news item on Nanowerk,

Professor John Boland, Director of CRANN, the SFI-funded [Science Foundation of Ireland] nanoscience institute based at Trinity College Dublin, and a Professor in the School of Chemistry has been awarded a €2.5 million research grant by the European Research Council (ERC). This is the second only Advanced ERC grant ever awarded in Physical Sciences in Ireland.

The Award will see Professor Boland and his team continue world-leading research into how nanowire networks can lead to a range of smart materials, sensors and digital memory applications. The research could result in computer networks that mimic the functions of the human brain and vastly improve on current computer capabilities such as facial recognition.

The University of Dublin’s Trinity College CRANN (Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices) April 3, 2013 news release, which originated the news item,  provides details about Boland’s proposed nanowire network,

Nanowires are spaghetti like structures, made of materials such as copper or silicon. They are just a few atoms thick and can be readily engineered into tangled networks of nanowires. Researchers worldwide are investigating the possibility that nanowires hold the future of energy production (solar cells) and could deliver the next generation of computers.

Professor Boland has discovered that exposing a random network of nanowires to stimuli like electricity, light and chemicals, generates chemical reaction at the junctions where the nanowires cross. By controlling the stimuli, it is possible to harness these reactions to manipulate the connectivity within the network. This could eventually allow computations that mimic the functions of the nerves in the human brain – particularly the development of associative memory functions which could lead to significant advances in areas such as facial recognition.

Commenting Professor John Boland said, “This funding from the European Research Council allows me to continue my work to deliver the next generation of computing, which differs from the traditional digital approach.  The human brain is neurologically advanced and exploits connectivity that is controlled by electrical and chemical signals. My research will create nanowire networks that have the potential to mimic aspects of the neurological functions of the human brain, which may revolutionise the performance of current day computers.   It could be truly ground-breaking.”

It’s only in the news release’s accompanying video that the memristor and neuromorphic engineering are mentioned,

I have written many times about the memristor, most recently in a Feb. 26, 2013 posting titled, How to use a memristor to create an artificial brain, where I noted a proposed ‘blueprint’ for an artificial brain. A contested concept, the memristor has attracted critical commentary as noted in a Mar. 19, 2013 comment added to the ‘blueprint’  post,

A Sceptic says:

….

Before talking about blueprints, one has to consider that the dynamic state equations describing so-called non-volatile memristors are in conflict with fundamentals of physics. These problems are discussed in:

“Fundamental Issues and Problems in the Realization of Memristors” by P. Meuffels and R. Soni (http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7319)

“On the physical properties of memristive, memcapacitive, and meminductive systems” by M. Di Ventra and Y. V. Pershin (http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.7063)

Electrochemistry of memristors in a critique of the 2008 discovery

I received notice yesterday (Sept. 5, 2012) of a paper,  ‘Fundamental Issues and Problems in the Realization of Memristors’, disputing HP Labs’ 2008 discovery of the ‘memristor’.

Written by Paul Meuffels and Rohit Soni, the paper examines the ‘memristor’ claims from the perspective of  electrochemistry. From the July 31, 2012 submission on arXiv.org,

In 2008, researchers at the Hewlett-Packard (HP) laboratories claimed to have found an analytical physical model for a genuine memristor device [1]. The model is considered for a thin TiO_2 film containing a region which is highly self-doped with oxygen vacancies and a region which is less doped, i.e., a single-phase material with a built-in chemical inhomogeneity sandwiched between two platinum electrodes. On base of the proposed model, Strukov et al. [1] were able to obtain the characteristic dynamical state equation and current-voltage relation for a genuine memristor. However, some fundamental facts of electrochemistry have been overlooked by the authors while putting forward their model, namely the coupling of diffusion currents at the boundary between both regions. The device will operate for a certain time like a “chemical capacitor” until the chemical inhomogeneity is balanced out, thus violating the essential requirement on a genuine memristor, the so-called “no energy discharge property”. Moreover, the dynamical state equation for the HP-memristor device must fail as this relation violates by itself Landauer’s principle of the minimum energy costs for information processing. Maybe, such an approach might be upheld if one introduces an additional prerequisite by specifying the minimum amount of electric power input to the device which is required to continuously change internal, physical states of the considered system. However, we have reasonable doubts with regard to this.

Speaking as an amateur, while I cannot follow the discussion in any depth, this paper is written in such a fashion that the argumentation can be followed even by someone (such as me) with little knowledge of chemistry or electronics. I can’t assess the validity of the validity of the arguments and would dearly to see a response from HP Labs with their take on this approach.

In the meantime I’m left with a question, if HP Labs did not ‘discover the memristor, what did they find?