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HP Backs Memristor Mass Production

Posted by Soulskill on from the can't-wait-for-the-next-round-of-patent-battles dept.

neo12 writes with news that Hewlett-Packard is teaming with Hynix Semiconductor, the world's second-largest producer of memory chips, to mass produce memristors for the first time. Quoting the BBC: "HP says the first memristors should be widely available in about three years. The devices started as a theoretical prediction in 1971 but HP's demonstration and publication of a real working device has put them on a possible roadmap to replace memory chips or even hard drives. ... Steve Furber, professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester, explained that the potential benefits lie in the fact that memristors are 'much simpler in principle than transistors. Because they are formed as a film between two wires, they don't have to be implanted into the silicon surface — as do transistors, which form the storage locations in Flash — so they could be built in layers in 3D,' he told BBC News. 'Of course, the devil is in the detail, and I don't think the manufacturing challenges have been fully exposed yet.'"

2 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Can someone explain how the memristor work? by 42forty-two42 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Presumably they'd have some capacitors over the power supply for the memristor to stabilize the power a bit. And I'm sure they don't use raw AC - there's probably a low-voltage DC inverter in there.

  2. Re:Haven't heard of this one by mlts · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Memristor based crossbar switches will be extremely useful for two uses:

    Shuffling data between VMs in a secure manner on a host such as an IBM 795 or a zSeries that has a large number of VMs in use for different tasks. This way a bunch of VMs that talk amongst themselves frequently (a DB server to an app server) will end up being able to do high I/O without that slamming the CPU.

    Another use is tiered memory, where one has a machine with fast RAM and slow RAM, with slow RAM being exponentially faster than going to SSD or magnetic platters. If memristors become able to be printed on a large scale, perhaps we will see machines with 16-32 GB of DRAM, then 256-512 GB of memristive RAM that is used as both swap space, but also a persistant cache for the OS to boot from an image with, never touching the storage media until the OS is fully loaded and the user wants to load documents, or the OS is doing a backup.