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"A memristor is essentially a resistor with memory," explains Stan Williams of HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, who reports the memristor's creation in this week's Nature 1. "The actual resistance of the memristor changes depending on the amount of voltage and the time for which that voltage has been applied to the device."That means that a computer created from memristive circuits can 'remember' what has happened to it previously, and freeze that memory when the circuit is turned off. This quality could allow computers to turn off and on again in an instant, as all the components could revert to their last state instantly, rather than having to 'boot up'.
Thanks for the link. I forwarded it to a coworker who has been studying electronics for some time.
I wonder what the capacity would be? Might be usefull for limited applications like POS terminals or various engineering control consoles...but for the average computer I imagine magnetic media will still reign supreme.
Currently the good folk at HP Labs have exploited this to create simple data storage devices. Using memristors, they have been able to store 100 gigabits on a single die in one square centimeter. That is substantially more than the 16 gigabits for a single flash chip, and a comparable storage density to modern hard drives. In the future, HP thinks they can get that up to a terabit or more per centimeter... with the access speed of DRAM. Clearly, this will vie with other technologies such as IBM's racetrack memory. Of course, storage is only one possible role for memristors.
HP Labs plans to unveil RRAM prototype chips based on memristors with crossbar arrays in 2009.
"RRAMs are our near term goal, but our second target for memristors, in the long term, is to transform computing by building adaptive control circuits that learn," said Stewart. "Analog circuits using electronic synapses will require at least five more years of research."They estimate that it will take five years to produce the first analog memristor prototypes, with commercial applications about a decade out.
The researchers previously reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had devised a new method for storing and retrieving information from a vast three-dimensional array of memristors. The scheme could potentially free designers to stack thousands of switches in a high-rise fashion, permitting a new class of ultradense computing devices even after two-dimensional scaling reaches fundamental limits.Memristor-based systems also hold out the prospect of fashioning analog computing systems that function more like biological brains, Dr. Chua said.“Our brains are made of memristors,” he said, referring to the function of biological synapses. “We have the right stuff now to build real brains.”
Topic: Memristors (Read 3262 times)