HP Advances Next-Gen Memory Technology

angry tapir writes "HP scientists have made a small breakthrough in the development of a next-generation memory technology called memristors, which some see as a potential replacement for today's widely used flash and DRAM technologies. In a paper to be published today in the journal Nanotechnology, scientists report that they have mapped out the basic chemistry and structure of what happens inside a memristor during its electrical operation."

Comments

Re:powers of ten

[stranger_to_himself]

Much better article summarising this for the lay person (ie begins by explaining what memresitors are).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13392857

Re:what about F-RAM?

[vlm]

The only real difference between FRAM and memristors, is FRAM has been licensing and shipping COTS product for over a decade, and memristors are a vaporware product from extremely deep pockets trying to bite a piece off that (admittedly very tiny) market by skating as close as possible to existing patents / copyrights / trademarks without actually being sued out of existence. Its kind of like asking what is the technical difference between a "turbo-" marketed product vs a "i-" marketed product.

Both are basically microscopic core memories. Magnetic field hysteresis, measure magnetic state by trying to force to a given state and seeing how much power it takes, none means its already that state and a bunch means it was the other state.

There are other theoretical uses for memristors. The killer is both devices are current mode devices, which means they'll almost certainly never be power-competitive with voltage mode devices. The other killer is they are not silicon, so that means scrap all the existing fabs and start over. Plus virtually everything out there is silicon based, so it'll be interesting seeing the hybrid devices. And the fourth killer is that memristor/fram technology is advancing, but mass produced silicon dram is also advancing, in fact for a decade or so has been advancing faster, making "modern core memory" ever less interesting.

On the other hand, depending on their temperature handling properties, a memristor based CPU that glows dull red with heat might be OK, don't know. I do know that off the shelf silicon for a variety of reasons doesn't "like" working above a couple hundred degrees, but memristors might not have the same limitations.