Memristors perform logic, too

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12 May 2010 News

Researchers from HP have announced advancements in memristor technology that could change the way computer systems are designed while better equipping them to process the current ‘information explosion.’

The researchers have discovered that the memristor – a resistor with memory that represents the fourth basic circuit element in electrical engineering – has more capabilities than was previously thought. In addition to being useful in storage devices, the memristor can perform logic, enabling computation to one day be performed in chips where data is stored, rather than on a specialised central processing unit.

The latest findings about the memristor are detailed in a paper published this week in the journal Nature by six researchers at HP’s Information and Quantum Systems Lab, led by R. Stanley Williams. These developments follow the HP Labs team’s initial demonstration of the existence of the memristor in 2008. HP has created development-ready architectures for memory chips using memristors and believes it is possible that devices incorporating the element could come to market within the next few years.

An image of a circuit with 17 memristors captured by an atomic force microscope. Each memristor is composed of two layers of titanium dioxide connected by wire. As electrical current is applied to one layer, the small signal resistance of the other layer is changed, which may in turn be used as a method to register data

HP researchers have also designed a new architecture within which multiple layers of memristor memory can be stacked on top of each other in a single chip. In five years, such chips could be used to create handheld devices that offer 10 times greater embedded memory than exists today or to power supercomputers that allow work like movie rendering and genomic research to be done dramatically faster than Moore’s Law suggests is possible.

Eventually, memristor-based processors might replace the silicon in the smart display screens found in e-readers and could one day even become the successors to silicon on a larger scale. Memristors require less energy to operate and are faster than present solid-state storage technologies such as Flash memory, and they can store at least twice as much data in the same area. They are virtually immune to radiation, which can disrupt transistor-based technologies – making them an attractive way to enable ever smaller but more powerful devices. Because they do not ‘forget,’ memristors can enable computers that turn on and off like a light switch.

According to Williams, “Memristive devices could change the standard paradigm of computing by enabling calculations to be performed in the chips where data is stored rather than in a specialised central processing unit. Thus, we anticipate the ability to make more compact and power-efficient computing systems well into the future, even after it is no longer possible to make transistors smaller via the traditional Moore’s Law approach.”

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Memristors perform logic, too

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