Memristor Based RAM Could Be Out By 2009

neural.disruption writes "According to the EETimes, HP is announcing that it 'plans to unveil RRAM prototype chips based on memristors with crossbar arrays in 2009.' I don't know if you remember the earlier story about HP Labs proving the existence of the Memristor that had been predicted in 1971 by Leon Chua, and has the nice property of maintaining a memory of the current that passes by it. This could bring us a new type of small non-volatile high-speed RAM at low cost because of the low complexity of the mechanism employed."

Comments

Security Concerns

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems like this will make recovering encryption keys from RAM much easier. If I understand the article correctly, these devices won't automatically clear themselves or decay like conventional RAM. I'm not quite sure I want this thing in my computer until this gets worked out.

Re:Security Concerns

[neokushan]

True, it's probably not a good idea to have ALL your memory as this stuff, but why not have say, the core OS files (The ones that wont contain any important, private data) stored in this type of memory for that near-instant-on effect? In theory, the OS could stay in RAM and just do a quick verification check to make sure it's not damaged/corrupted in some way (and since it's ALREADY in RAM, it should be lightning quick) and then reload any files that have been, then boom, you're at your desktop in a matter of seconds.
Plus, I doubt it'll actually be as fast as regular RAM anyway, that would be too good to be true, so chances are we'll just see this as a companion to good ol' DDR3/4/WhateverExistsAtTheTime.

It would certainly benefit the likes of embedded devices, set-top boxes and such that are starting to really take the piss with their multi-minute startup times.

Re:Security Concerns

[AllIGotWasThisNick]

near-instant-on effect

Now if only disk IO was actually the major delay in the boot process. You might consider driver initialization, software initialization, network delays, waiting for user interaction, etc.

Re:Security Concerns

[Ortega-Starfire]

So don't let people have physical access to your computer. Or invest in a thermite/C4 charge inside your computer. Or both.

Re:Security Concerns

[Moryath]

In theory, the OS could stay in RAM and just do a quick verification check to make sure it's not damaged/corrupted in some way

Reminds me of letting Col. Clink check on the prisoners. Letting the OS "integrity check" itself is an amusing thought and a very, very bad idea.

then boom, you're at your desktop in a matter of seconds.

We get this pipe dream every few years - people talking about the "instant-on" computer. Sleep modes, wake modes, hibernation, etc.

I have an idea: grow a few seconds' worth of patience.

It would certainly benefit the likes of embedded devices, set-top boxes and such that are starting to really take the piss with their multi-minute startup times.

Hmmm... I have an Xbox360, DVD player, DVD/vcr Recorder combo unit, Xbox, PS3, Wii, PS2, and a computer. The only one with a "multi-minute" startup time is the computer. And honestly, that stays on most of the time anyways since its primary purpose is as a NAS for the Xbox to feed media content from (gotta love XBMC).

Other than the computer, my TV is the longest-warming-up item. And that's because it's an lcd projection screen, and has to warm the bulb up.

Where are these "multi-minute startup" devices you're referring to? Let me guess, you grew up on Elmo and your generation has the attention span of a goldfish.

For reference's sake: older CRT televisions/monitors can take as much as a few minutes to fully warm up, and generally 30-45 seconds to wake and warm up. Projectors and most big-screen TV's, same deal. Want to know how long it used to take to fast-forward through the ads in a VHS movie? Actually, it's shorter than trying to get past the adcrap the movie studios are putting on DVD's these days.

And that's not even mentioning the fact that the MafiAA companies are illegally abusing the FBI warning code to prevent you from skipping/fast-forwarding past the aforementioned adcrap.

Re:Security Concerns

[Smidge204]

Unless, of course, you're waking a computer out of hibernate mode... then it's pretty much all about disk I/O throughput.

If this were possible, it could basically become unnecessary to actually *shut down* your computer.

More importantly, if you suddenly lose (or switch off) power it might be possible to simply pick up where you left off - with some minor firmware tweaks to get the hardware running again without wiping RAM.
=Smidge=

Re:Security Concerns

[neokushan]

I like how you've immediately assumed that I'm simply impatient just because YOU'VE never experienced what I'm referring to.
I notice in the list of electronic devices you have, none of them are Satellite/Cable boxes or Tivo-like devices.
I have one such device, it's a Cable box with a hard drive built into it and it takes a solid 2-3mins to start up.
Sure, that's not a big deal, it doesn't really bother me that much since I'm only missing 2-3mins of crap TV, but what does bother me is that the people who make it (Virgin Media, in case you're wondering - and it's British Company, don't want you assuming I'm making something up just because you may not have heard of it) say that you're not supposed to turn it off anyway.
Why would I want to keep such a box on 24/7 if I'm not even going to use it half of the time? Makes sense if I want to record something, sure, but I rarely record something every single day, or during the night when I'm asleep - so why not turn it off? It saves me money on electric and it saves the environment a little.
But I digress, the point is there ARE set-top boxes out there that take a long time to boot, so don't be so ignorant.
Besides, that was just ONE example where this technology could actually prove useful, I don't see you suggesting anything better.

Re:Security Concerns

[mcmonkey]

For reference's sake...

I'd mod you up, but I can't find "+1 Get off my lawn"

Re:Security Concerns

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

OS check on power-on would be plenty safe for error checking purposes. It is a pretty basic application of checksumming. In theory, it could fail; but the odds are vanishingly small.

Against malice, I agree, not useful. Of course, if the attacker has arbitrary read/write access to the nonvolatile RAM, it is game over, period. The logical solution would be to move control over the nonvolatile RAM to the system hardware. Just as the BIOS can restrict the system's choice of boot devices, it could lock or unlock access to the nonvolatile RAM. Lots of fiddly implementation possibilities; but the concept is clear.

The main obstacle to instant-on in computers seems to be the ghastly state of peripheral power management support. All sorts of system peripherals have state that needs to be preserved or restored, some of it dependent on outside conditions(network cards, etc.) and support is uneven at best. The fact that ACPI is said to be a bit of a clusterfuck doesn't much help. Even now, with the various suspend modes, we can get within a couple of watts of what nonvolatile RAM would be like; but support for instant on/off is hampered by peripherals being wonky.

Re:Security Concerns

[Microlith]

I have an idea: grow a few seconds' worth of patience.

It's not a matter of patience, it's a matter of eliminating a needlessly slow bottleneck on a system.

To expand upon the GP's point, if you could take 100GB of this stuff and slap it into your memory space you'd never, really, have to hit the hard disk for applications again. This does two things:

- Frees up your DRAM for things that actually change frequently.
- Frees up your hard disk which should be holding things that need long term storage, not execution.

Pair it with 8GB of DRAM or so and I can't see any problems. Sure you'd have to design filesystems to support it, but some already exist with the basic ideas implemented.

Re:Security Concerns

[merreborn]

We get this pipe dream every few years - people talking about the "instant-on" computer. Sleep modes, wake modes, hibernation, etc.

I have an idea: grow a few seconds' worth of patience.

Hear, hear! I don't even know why they bothered developing processors after the 386, or anything faster than 1200 baud modems. They worked fine, it's just these damn kids were too impatient to wait 15 hours to download 50 megs, or 3 hours to render a single frame of Doom 3.

Now they want computers to boot faster? I happen to *like* the fact that it takes 15 minutes to get Vista up and running. Gives me a chance to take a nap, or brew some coffee.

Re:Security Concerns

[Smidge204]

The difference is current RAM needs to be maintained. Suspend to RAM doesn't help in a power outage and/or dead battery condition.

Otherwise yes, they're pretty much the same thing.
=Smidge=

Re:Security Concerns

[epp_b]

You forgot the "get off my lawn!" part at the end of your comment.

Seriously, get over yourself. Instant-on computing isn't just something we want because we're impatient. It's very convenient and productive.

I've stopped shutting my computer down every night in favour of using standby mode. Particularly on a laptop, it works very well. It takes two seconds to go into standby where it's drawing just enough power (read: almost nothing) to retain the data in memory. Then, in the morning when I bring out of standby, it takes only ten seconds until my session from the night before is conveniently restore and I can pick up right where I left off. Sure, a few applications don't like it -- PuTTY's connections are dropped, my email client occasionally balks at not having had a network connection -- but merely reopening a few SSH sessions and clearing my email error log is a whole lot better than a three minute wait from a cold boot and spending another ten minutes getting all my programs running and back how they were (that includes starting up my VMWare virtual machines which, by the way, are completely unaffected by going in and out of standby mode).

Re:Security Concerns

[gyrogeerloose]

My "digital" cable box doesn't even have a hard drive but if the power goes down for any reason, it can take upwards of five minutes to reboot. If memristor RAM could fix that, I'm all for it.

Re:Security Concerns

[drinkypoo]

You can also use it to get a recoverable ramdisk, recoverable disk cache, et cetera. Just imagine rebooting and still having files in cache. Your computer could preload for the boot at shutdown time, so you'd get the benefits of a cold boot, and a preload.

Re:Security Concerns

[Shadow-isoHunt]

You know I've posted this on /. like three or four times now and you'd think it'd be more common knowledge by now... but getting encryption keys from RAM is pretty trivial. It's called a cold boot attack.

http://citp.princeton.edu/memory/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_boot_attack

This attack was sort of one that was under the hat of pentesters and hobbyists until a few months ago when it was rather a do-it-yourself thing, but then McGrew Security made a followup PoC - http://mcgrewsecurity.com/projects/msramdmp/ to the Princeton paper. I played with it right after it came out, and then awhile later threw up a tutorial on remote-exploit. Now, Mati Aharoni's a really smart guy and most assuredly knew about the PoC before I did, but shortly after the tutorial and some discussion on IRC, it's now in BackTrack 3 (http://www.remote-exploit.org/backtrack.html) as a syslinux boot option putting the attack within the reach of everyone.

http://tourian.jchost.net/shadow/liveusb/boot.png

Getting the encryption keys out of the ram dump isn't a point and click operation, but the code's out there and it compiles. People are walking around right now with this on their USB key, and it's the sort of attack that is a real problem that physical access and untrusted users present now. Even without the encryption keys, you've still got the contents of previous webpages, cookies, IM conversations, unencrypted files, and everything else in RAM. Disabling boot from USB doesn't matter much because you can just use a grub CD, and carry around a laptop drive and do dumps on multiple machines. Hell, if you felt like dealing with it you could make it a PXE image... even disabling both boot from USB and CD, most cases in public places(think Dell) can be quickly popped open with the power still on and the BIOS jumper tripped.

Things like this should make you really nervous if you were freaking out about Microsoft's little COFEE ( http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/29/1441215&from=rss ) toy, since it's no more impressive than a customized "Gonzor's Payload" U3 USB Drive ( http://wiki.gonzor228.com/index.php/SBConfig ) with a Microsoft Sticker and this is quite a bit more, well, dirty.

Re:Security Concerns

[Repossessed]

I am the only one thinking of the nightmare that making suspend default in Vista has caused? Get it to work at the software level first please.

Re:Security Concerns

[x2A]

"Managing to shave 5 seconds off boot? Not so much so, especially since it offers no other concrete advantages once you're booted"

What if you're a kernel, or bootloader developer? Saving 5 out of 20 seconds boot time means you're spending 25% less time waiting while you're testing. And that was just off the top of my head!

"we're back to having to load that memory check routine from another source"

That's really not that big a deal.

"of the most popular pipe dreams of these ideas? Do we have a set of checks for each file in there? Where did we store it? How long will it take to check it? Are we recalculating it constantly on the fly...?"

Um... ZFS? End to end checksumming? Pipe dream? Just because you've not heard of it being done, doesn't make it magic.

"might as well just keep its system state on a pair of revolving images on the hard disk anyways" ...because harddrives don't fail or need to be checked?

Re:Security Concerns

[miro f]

couldn't you then conceivably use the same non-volatile RAM in the device memory?

Re:Security Concerns

[miro f]

Managing to shave 5 seconds off boot? Not so much so, especially since it offers no other concrete advantages once you're booted.

If boot times can be dropped to a couple of seconds people will be less likely to leave their computers on for hours while away from their desks, just for the convenience of it.

Not to mention that it won't only be boot time, but possible load times of other software and files that is improved as well.

non-volatile high-speed RAM...

[oneal13rru]

well, I'm certainly glad my RAM will stop exploding inside my PC on a daily basis... driving me insane!!!

Flash Killer

[maz2331]

If this stuff actually works as promised, it will be way faster and longer-lived (in terms of write cycles) than flash. 50nS is pretty slow compared to DRAM, but for flash replacement it should be pretty zippy. Especially if there's no need to do block erase and rewrites.

Re:Flash Killer

[Stanistani]

I'm still holding out for isolinear chips.

Re:Flash Killer

[jd]

I always thought the industry was too conservative to allow chips to Flash. Seriously, this is going to have serious potential in the solid-state disk arena, but will probably not affect firmware and BIOSes as you don't update or access those a vast amount. For SSDs, you really want this for the bulk storage but battery-backed RAM for transaction logging and caching as you don't need those to be longer-lived than the time it needs to complete a full transaction.

(Ideally, you'd have battery-backed "smart RAM" that can complete transactions into memristor storage even if disconnected from a main computer and power supply. Then you'd have something that was not only fast but proof against most idiots. Not all, as idiots are so inventive, but most.)

Still not holding my breath

[default luser]

They've been saying they'll give us affordable NVRAM without the drawbacks of flash for years, and it still hasn't happened.

MRAM - fast, but not as fast as DRAM. Very low-density.
PRAM - more volatile than flash, because it can change state spontaneously based on temperature (thermally written).
FeRAM - can't be made with cutting-edge processes, and even then can't match the density of flash.
CBRAM - still experimental.

I'll just be surprised if HP can just produce a memory module that is as fast a DRAM, let alone as high-capacity as flash.

Re:Still not holding my breath

[Dwedit]

MRAM does exist, it replaces battery backed 32KB SRAM chips.

Re:Still not holding my breath

[fpgaprogrammer]

I'm currently using Magneto-RAM in a project. I'm also interested in the development of Carbon Nanotube-based NRAM from Nantero. Density is more important than speed for most NV storage applications. Unless the cost structure and density changes substantially vs Flash ROM, these types of exotic NV RAMs are going to be useful only in situations that require a lot of write accesses: like storing the directory info for a cheaper/larger Flash-ROM array which can't support as many write cycles. Even in these situations the exotic NV RAMs are just a replacement for SRAM and a Battery which is cheaper because the structure, processes and materials are standard.

Re:Still not holding my breath

[fpgaprogrammer]

MRAMs come in 4 MBit density so it replaces battery backed 512 KB SRAM chips.

Re:Still not holding my breath

[mo]

Every single example you list above is based on the transistor. Sure, there's lots of variations (MRAM using magnets, PRAM using chalcogenide glass, FeRAM using a ferroelectric layer, etc.), but these are all basically: glue stuff on a transistor to store data.

Memristor-based RRAM is different. It doesn't use transistors at all. This is truly a departure from all of the exsting RAM technologies, and while the prospect of RRAM storage is pretty cool, the possibility of analog computing using memristors is even neater. I'm cautiously optimistic that this technology is going to take computing in some interesting directions.

Re:Still not holding my breath

[georgewilliamherbert]

The mechanics of how these work make producing compact high speed arrays easy.

The circuit element is just two stacked planar layers between an underlying and overhead wire. Look at the electron microscope images to see what a row of them looks like... they're no bigger than the contact areas of the wires. A chip of these would be a grid of vertical wires, the active layers, then a grid of horizontal layers. The packing density is approximately wire spacing density.

Speed is good - you send a moderate voltage down one side and see if you get strong or weak signals out the far side, so it's essentially no delay other than speed of electron travel.

Skepticism is one thing. There could be all sorts of gotchas going from a small test area to large chips of this. But the fundamental method of operation is fast and the fundamental area is small, and it works at test scale. This is an extremely promising technology.

Re:Still not holding my breath

[Bender_]

Sorry, but that is bullshit.

CBRAM, PRAM and RRAM are generally based on two terminal devices that are written at a high current and read at a low current.

For all of those there are two ways of arranging them into an array: A passive matrix with diodes or an active matrix with transistors. The former is slightly simpler to make but suffers from scalability issues.

The reason why HP made a passive matrix is simply because they don't own a fab capable of producing dense memory. This is nothing but a research toy. Their prototype does not even include diodes, meaning that it won't work in a full matrix.

It is important to realize that HPs "memristor" is actually a fairly conventional oxide based RRAM device. Many other groups have reported similar devices in the past.

Nitpicking, I know, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically, he predicted the existence of a non-linear memristor. A linear memristor is exactly the same thing as regular resistor.

Low cost?

[snl2587]

An emerging technology being offered at low cost? I highly doubt it. Not that it isn't a simple mechanism (at least according to the article), but I can't imagine anyone selling them for less than the cost of standard RAM...at least, not for a few years or heavy adoption.

Patents

[tobiasly]

I'm sure it's already patented by Rambus.

Not quite...

[goldsaturn]

"If this were possible, it could basically become unnecessary to actually *shut down* your computer." Updating your computer is almost complete. You must restart your computer for the effects to take effect. Do you want to restart your computer now?

Even better

[Korin43]

Windows bootup using i-ram (hard drive made out of DDR memory): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PiYgBhAkAM This seems like it should be similar to what they are talking about.

Great!

[Datamonstar]

I need more RRRAM in my PPPowerBook!

Information about...

[neural.disruption]

Memristors and how they work: HP Labs Memristor FAQ.

Re:Strong AI? Analog circuits rock!

[calidoscope]

And to think that my first analog circuits class was taught by prof Leon Chua...