The New York Times (NY Times) reports HP scientists have developed a simple circuit element called the memristor that will facilitate the development of smaller circuits. According to the HP scientists, current chip technology is at 45 nanometers and the semiconductor industry can only see shrinking circuits to 20 nanometers based on current technologies. The memristor enables circuits of 15 nanometers to be developed and, according to the HP scientists, can be dropped down to 4 nanometers.
While they are touting this new component as an essential building block for advanced circuits for intelligent computer architectures, the most immediate commercialization opportunities are in developing computer memory products. The NY Times reports:
The memristor, an electrical resistor with memory properties, may also make it possible to fashion advanced logic circuits, a class of reprogrammable chips known as field programmable gate arrays, that are widely used for rapid prototyping of new circuits and for custom-made chips that need to be manufactured quickly.
Potentially even more tantalizing is the ability of the memristors to store and retrieve a vast array of intermediate values, not just the binary 1s and 0s conventional chips use. This allows them to function like biological synapses and makes them ideal for many artificial intelligence applications ranging from machine vision to understanding speech.
Independent researchers said that it seemed likely that the memristor might relatively quickly be applied in computer memories, but that other applications could be more challenging. Typically, technology advances are not adopted unless they offer large advantages in cost or performance over the technologies they are replacing.
One limitation is the speed. The NY Times says:
The most significant limitation that the Hewlett-Packard researchers said the new technology faces is that the memristors function at about one-tenth the speed of today’s DRAM memory cells. They can be made in the same kinds of semiconductor factories that the chip industry now uses, however.
However, according to HP, this disadvantage maybe mitigated by the ability of the chip to store data even when the power is turned off. According to the HP press release:
One application for this research could be the development of a new kind of computer memory that would supplement and eventually replace today’s commonly used dynamic random access memory (DRAM). Computers using conventional DRAM lack the ability to retain information once they lose power. When power is restored to a DRAM-based computer, a slow, energy-consuming “boot-up” process is necessary to retrieve data from a magnetic disk required to run the system.
In contrast, a memristor-based computer would retain its information after losing power and would not require the boot-up process, resulting in the consumption of less power and wasted time.
The news is good for Taiwan DRAM manufacturers. If memristors can be made to work faster they will provide companies like Powerchip and Nanya with new market opportunities. Of course the big Korean companies like Hynix will also be looking at this technology to see what its all about. The even better news for these companies is that the theoretical foundation for memristors was developed 40 years ago and as such is in the public domain. Therefore they can develop their own solutions royalty free. Of course HP is filing patents on their implementation of the memristor so to use the HP implementation may result in steep royalty costs.
Article 1: H.P. Reports Big Advance in Memory Chip Design
HP Press Release: HP Labs Proves Existence of New Basic Element for Electronic Circuits
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