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'Memtransistor' Brings World Closer To Brain-Like Computing
the gmr writes: According to a recent article published in the journal Nature, researchers at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering have developed a "memtransistor," a device that both stores information in memory and processes information. The combined transistor and memory resistor work more like a neuron and purports to make computing more brain-like. The new "memtransistor" would use less energy than digital computers and eliminate the need to run memory and processing as separate functions while also being more brain-like. Lead researcher Mark C. Hersam clarified the brain-like efficacy of the memtransistor: "...in the brain, we don't usually have one neuron connected to only one other neuron. Instead, one neuron is connected to multiple other neurons to form a network. Our device structure allows multiple contacts, which is similar to the multiple synapses in neurons... [but] making dozens of devices, as we have done in our paper, is different than making a billion, which is done with conventional transistor technology today." Hersam reported no barriers to scaling up to billions of devices. This new technology would make smart devices more capable and possibly more seemingly-human. The devices may also promote advances in neural networks and brain-computer interfaces, new technologies also recently reported at Futurism.
I recommend checking out e.g. Wikipedia's summary of the theoretical motivation behind them. It's not just about making "computers more like brains", it's rather that memristors are the fourth passive electronic component (the first three being the resistor, capacitor, and inductor). Once we've got a full set of passive electronic components, perhaps a lot of circuits that today have to be built using active components (transistors, op-amps, etc.) could be replaced by smaller and more efficient passive equivalents.
Timeouts, pages hanging... 40x/50x status codes ...what's the deal?
Whole website is dog slow and seems to be getting worse. Not that management cares, but this is usually what precedes a total failure.
Anybody seen this too?
Terminators are made with conventional resistors, and one is enough. Please hand in your geek-card.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Courtesy of following links in the Wikipedia RRAM page, I find this, an Panasonic 8 bit CPU with embedded RRAM memory. According to Wikipedia, this was around in mid 2016. (RRAM = resistive RAM, a more general term which would include HP's memristor.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Here is another. Late 2016, low power EEPROM (electronically erasable programmable read only memory) using RRAM technology. In this case, it looks like they are pushing low power consumption as their niche.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
How is this different than HPs memristor from a decade ago?
CyberDyne Systems announces their new "Neural Net CPU". Based on recent breakthroughs of quantum computing and memtransistors, the combination of these technologies promises "many more computations can be done each second, quadrillions of switching positions are possible, many of them simultaneous at each quantum level."
Comment was obviously written by a bot using AI running on a memristors platform, as a demonstration of the technology.
You can't handle the truth! - Because I don't post left all my comments get modded down, bye bye Karma.
We have a pretty good idea of how neurons work and behave individually and also some brain components are understood up to a point - eg visual system which has allowed some pretty good advances in artificial neural networks. However how individual systems in the brain link up and produce a conciousness - the ghost in the machine - is still frankly anyones guess. There are lots of idea but nobody really has a clue yet.
It's in the same space as flash, perhaps closer to XPoint, but doesn't really have the investment of either to bring it to market in quantity and then doesn't have the economies of scale to make it competitive. Last I heard, the biggest chips were 64MB. It's hard to compete with flash because of the incredibly high volumes of flash that can be used to amortise R&D costs. Last I heard, HP was hoping that flash would run into a wall in scalability and they'd get more investment for alternatives in the same space, but that doesn't seem to have happened yet.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Another millimeter in a race the distance of which we have yet to understand?
You clearly never red Von Fredircks fifth postulate of public discourse, please read Willhems essayist, and rodgers publik speaking and it's effect on reason, or sargentzi's Das Discobolus in the original German before you recommend better educations to people ob slashdot.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
And immediately, 100 million programmers skills were rendered obsolete
With RAM == Storage, there will indeed be a paradigm shift. There will be plenty of more work for the programmers to do, such as implementing admin-space cron jobs to 'refresh' the NVRAM at 3:00 every Saturday. . . or something like that.
Also, Hardware Designers are in for a treat as well.
The whole paradigm will shift when we reach that stage. We (researchers) have been working on the physical realization of a CMOS-integrable memristor for about 20 years, so it's about time.
The biggest barrier was the CMOS industy's reluctance to allow any new chemical elements into their well-controlled processes. Well, with high-k gate oxide they let in a new element (it's in your computer) to stretch Moore's Law. That barrier has fallen, and the time is ripe.
It's in the same space as flash, perhaps closer to XPoint, but doesn't really have the investment of either to bring it to market in quantity and then doesn't have the economies of scale to make it competitive. Last I heard, the biggest chips were 64MB. It's hard to compete with flash because of the incredibly high volumes of flash that can be used to amortise R&D costs. Last I heard, HP was hoping that flash would run into a wall in scalability and they'd get more investment for alternatives in the same space, but that doesn't seem to have happened yet.
Intel has not revealed the mechanism of X-Point. It could be a special variant of flash storage (like Samsung also just announced).
64 MB sounds about right. The ones I know are ferroelectric RAM (Fe-RAM), another nonvolatile type of memory technology. RAMtron is the company who makes it, and yes, it is for specific-case niche markets like "high temperature operation" for engines and such. RAMtron was bought-out by a larger player a couple of years ago.
There is a solution to RAMtron's scaling problem (the polycrystalline active layer should be monocrystalline), but they didn't have the resources to do due diligence and check it back then. Nor the cash to license the IP. Maybe now their new owners do...
I am a nanotechnologist, and this is the BS typical of our field.
The effect they're looking at is reversibly changing the gate properties of the transistor by carefully spiking the voltage on one input. This is something you can do with a silicon transistor; the magnitude and reproducibility of the effect is driven by the defect density and thickness of the gate oxide. It's temperature dependent, atmosphere dependent... all this stuff is very scientifically interesting, there are a lot of papers and PhD theses you can write on this.
15 years ago, we saw this same effect in carbon nanotube transistors, and it was my turn to get excited about moving defects around to create and tune unusual transistor properties.
Mark Hersam, the lead author of this work, knows all this stuff. He knows memristor (and memtransistor) research goes back decades further than HP in the early 2000s. His abstract contains some of those references.
What we've always lacked and are still lacking here is some basic understanding of how this fits into the real world. How does this fit into any sort of system? What does "scalable fabrication" of (whatever nanotech device) actually require?
In nanotechnology, we have become truly excellent at producing bespoke devices with exotic materials and designs, but we (as a field and as individuals) have shockingly poor grasp of the problems we're supposed to be solving as well as the actual manufacturing processes we'll need to fit in to.
At the end of his abstract, Hersam suggests that the best use of his device design is to study defects in nanomaterials. This is a great example of the circular logic that has held nanotechnology back for 30 years.