There you go, the newest term you can sling around to prove your scientific engineering creds. Appearing in a 1971 thesis written by Leon Chua and proving to be highly elusive, a research team from Hewlett Packard describes their successful hunt for "the missing circuit element" in the current edition of the science journal Nature. Michael Hopkins's synopsis of the article and this new development appears in Nature News, and John Markoff has a great write-up in today's New York Times.
What's the big deal? First, a memory device that might be up to ten times smaller than today's memory chips, which are close to being as small as they can get. Second, a type of memory that "remembers" its state when the power is turned off, dramatically reducing the amount of power consumed. Imagine computers that "wake up" instantly to the state they were in when powered off, rather than having to consume power constantly to keep their memory intact. Third, memory that has the potential for more value states than just the binary 1's and 0's used today, leading to new applications where mimicking biological functions such as speech or image recognition is important. Fourth, a manufacturing process that can use the existing chip fabrication plants that manufacturers have spent billions building.
Memristors are not as fast as current memory chips, so there are some questions about how it will perform in large-scale applications. There is another technology being developed by IBM and Intel competing for the next-generation prize. So the battle of the Titans is underway. Stay tuned.
hello team, which is the company working on manufacturing techniques for the memristor? regards,helmut bacher member of IEEE
Posted by: helmut bacher | January 07, 2009 at 03:43 PM