New Memristor Makes Low-Cost, High-Density Memory

KentuckyFC writes "A group of electronics engineers have discovered that a thin layer of vanadium oxide acts as a memristor, the fourth basic component of circuits after resistors, capacitors, and inductors that was discovered last year. At a critical temperature, a current passing through the layer causes it to change from an insulating state to a metal-like state, thereby changing its resistance (abstract). The effect lasts many hours — which is what makes the layer a memristor (a resistor with memory). The team says this could be scaled up to make resistive random access memory, or RRAM, at very low cost, from little more than layers of vanadium oxide."

Comments

Melts like a chocolate bar

[trolltalk.com]

" At a critical temperature,"

"Gee, I had it stored on this memsistor chip - but I left it in my shirt pocket, and my data melted."

The article doesn't say what temperature, so there's probably an issue there. Until that issue is solved, it's about as useful as write-only memory.

Also, looking at the required voltage (50 volts @ 0.6 amp), this is NOT going to be either high-density, or portable,or particularly energy-efficient.

Re:Melts like a chocolate bar

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the combination of 240W/byte and "critical temperature" looks like a problem. I hope they find a way to scale it down a lot.

Re:Melts like a chocolate bar

[who knows my name]

well, in its current state, it probably won't be very good for much; but small additions of other elements will probably give you a compound which does what you want. After all, the properties of most alloys change quite remarkably with small composition changes.

Re:Melts like a chocolate bar

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention according to Wikipedia its main component is HIGHLY toxic to humans. Considering we've been phasing out solder for an inferior replacement(which I personally believe will lead to MORE E-waste due to whiskers) just to cut down the poisons in our electronics I can't seen the green folks jumping onto something that is highly toxic AND water soluble. So IMHO this will end up a non starter before it even gets off the ground.

This will make the spooks happy

[jridley]

No more need to supercool RAM on seized computers in order to extract passwords - the RAM will just naturally hold state for hours.

If they're going to use this, (some) people are going to want to have more secure operating systems that don't leak security data all over the place.

Re:From the original announcment

[TheKidWho]

Memristors sound like an interesting method for creating analog electronic neural networks that learn...

Assuming you are correct, please explain

[Kupfernigk]

OK, postulating the component you describe, I understand that in simple terms it would store or release charge (like a capacitor)as the magnetic flux through it changed, or it would modify a magnetic field based on the charge added to or removed from it. As field strength and charge are potentials, under static conditions it would have a particular magnetic field around it based on charge stored. Is this correct? you state that the equation is d(phi)=M*dq.

How does this relate to a resistor which undergoes a discontinuous resistance change under critical conditions? Can you explain how it relates to the advertised device? Where is the charge being stored? Please continue to assume that I'm stupid, and explain the reasoning. My electromagnetic theory is thirty five years in the past now.

Re:Assuming you are correct, please explain

[dkf]

How does this relate to a resistor which undergoes a discontinuous resistance change under critical conditions? Can you explain how it relates to the advertised device? Where is the charge being stored? Please continue to assume that I'm stupid, and explain the reasoning. My electromagnetic theory is thirty five years in the past now.

No electronic component has truly discontinuous behavior under critical conditions. Even physical switches have rather complex transients (which is why they need a debounce circuit), and transistors are interesting analog devices. It's just that they're non-linear devices and (in computers) they're mostly used biased so that the circuits have (to a good approximation) binary behavior; the prerequisite for that is non-linearity.

Now, if there was an effect that was previously a theoretical one, or at best a lab curiosity, and HP have managed to figure out how to turn it into something practical, then more power to their elbows. It'll be very interesting to see what the electronic engineers of the world do with it.

Re:Not vaporware...

[ScrewMaster]

You forgot to mention the HP Memristor (tm) driver software, which despite being about 335 bytes in size, will come bundled in an installed package that is 37MB, just so HP software can show pointless splash screens and randomly create services and daemons that appear to serve no purpose whatsoever, while STILL not being able to cancel the printing of a document without cycling the power.

And which will periodically send copies of your memory to a remote HP server in order to "improve the customer experience."

HP is not what it once was. Thanks for that, Carla.