The memristor is coming
07 September 2010
HP has entered into a joint development agreement with Hynix Semiconductor Inc.
The coalition will enable them to bring memristor to market in future memory products. The two companies will jointly develop new materials and process integration technology to transfer the memristor technology from research to commercial development in the form of Resistive Random Access Memory (ReRAM). Hynix will implement the memristor technology in its research and development fab.
ReRAM is non-volatile memory with low power consumption that holds the potential to replace Flash memory currently used in mobile phones and MP3 players. It also has the potential to serve as a universal storage medium; memory that can behave as Flash, DRAM or even a hard drive.
Memristors require less energy to operate, are faster than present solid-state storage technologies and can retain information even when power is off.
According to Dr. S.W. Park, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Hynix:
“The memristor has storage capacity abilities many times greater than what competing technologies offer. By adopting HP’s memristor technology we can deliver new, energy-efficient products to our customers more quickly.”
The memristor, short for ‘memory resistor’, was postulated to be the fourth basic circuit element by Professor Leon Chua of the University of California at Berkeley in 1971, and was first intentionally reduced to practice by researchers in HP Labs, the company’s central research arm, in 2006.
Earlier this year, HP announced the discovery that the memristor can also perform logic, showing that memristor-based devices could change the standard paradigm of computing by enabling computation to be performed in chips where data is stored, rather than on a specialised central processing unit.
Joint development agreements are one way in which HP partners with others to use its intellectual property, which includes a portfolio of more than 30,000 patents. By collaborating to bring new technologies to market through intellectual property licenses and other technology transfer agreements, HP helps create new markets and generates a return on its research and development investment.
Stan Williams, Senior Fellow of HP, and Founding Director of Information and Quantum Systems Laboratory at HP Labs, comments: “This agreement brings together HP’s core intellectual property and a first-rate supplier with the capacity to bring this innovation to market in world-class memory on a mass scale. It is the most recent example of HP’s ability to drive product innovation from the Labs out into the commercial world. This is discovery and invention with clear purpose, which differentiates HP and reinforces the value of our research enterprise to HP as a whole.”
The top image shows a circuit with 17 memristors captured by an atomic force microscope. Each memristor is composed of two layers of titanium dioxide sandwiched between two wires. When a voltage is applied to the top wire of a memristor, the electrical resistance of the titanium dioxide layers is changed, which can be used as a method to store a bit of data.
The second image shows a circuit with 17 memristors captured by an atomic force
microscope. Each memristor is composed of two layers of titanium dioxide sandwiched between two wires. When a voltage is applied to the top wire of a memristor, the electrical resistance of the titanium dioxide layers is changed, which can be used as a method to store a bit of data.
Image courtesy of R. Stanley Williams, HP Senior Fellow and Director, Information and Quantum Systems Lab, HP Labs
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