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HP Creates First Hybrid Memristor Chip
An anonymous reader writes "HP researchers have built the first functioning hybrid memristor-transistor chip. Lead researcher Stanley Williams and his team built the very first memristor — the '4th fundamental element' of integrated circuits after resistors, capacitors and inductors — back in April. Memristors can remember their resistance, leading to novel electronic capabilities. The new FPGA circuit uses memristors to perform tasks normally carried out by (many more) transistors and is therefore smaller, more power efficient and cheaper to make, HP says. Memristors could also turn out to be a more compact, faster alternative to flash memory."
Am I the only when that thought memristors would remain the the 5-10 year category for the next couple of decades? Granted, this is just a proof of concept chip but it is moving along very rapidly compared to most 'game changing' advances.
20 years of theory and work just to make the first memristor, less than a year to use the new memristor in a device that actually improves over the standard technology. So when will we see commercially available devices? Next year some time at this rate?
Does anyone know what size features the chip was etched at? um? nm? That might give a clue how close it is to being used in other products.
The memristors made in April were 50 nm wide
Turns out after resistors, capacitors,inductors and memristors the 5th fundamental element is... love?
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In general there are two ways to store data (at least in a RAM type memory module). You can either use a capacitor (like DRAM) or a flip flop (SRAM). The problem with a capacitor is that it looses it's charge after a certain amount of time, and has to be refreshed (which is why DRAM is relatively slow). A flip-flop can be used to store one bit, but in order to do that two separate latches are needed. One latch has 2-4 gates each having 2-8 transistors. All of a sudden there are over a dozen transistors used to store one but. A memristior does not actually help any calculations, it just hopefully make storing data much more efficent
"Williams says. Still, he predicts that memristors will arrive in commercial circuits within the next three years."
It seems fast because nobody was talking about these things for the last 30 years. It's only because of technological advances in circuit printing and general computing that we can make these things and integrate them without having to develop a lot of additional technology. The transistor is very old but only after developing a lot of supporting tech have we been able to shrink them down to fit billions in a processor. That same tech can already be applied to memristors. We don't need to wait decades before we can shrink a memristor down to practical levels for ICs.
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Who is the idiot modding this as Funny? A SPICE model is an engineering tool used to diagram circuits. It is NOT related to any of the Spice Girls!!! :p
Where's the link to MetaModerate?? grrr...
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