HP scientists have made a breakthrough in the development of memristors, a fundamental circuit type that looks increasingly likely to replace NAND flash and possibly DRAM.
Essentially, they’ve figured out the physical and chemical mechanisms that make memristors work.
“We were on a path where we would have had something that works reasonably well, but this improves our confidence and should allow us to improve the devices such that they are significantly better,” the leader of the HP research team, R. Stanley Williams, told IDG News.
Memristors are the fourth fundamental type of passive circuitry, along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor. Like flash, memristors are nonvolatile – they “remember” their state when power isn’t applied to them.
The core advantage of memristors is that they can theoretically achieve speeds 10 times that of flash at one-tenth the power budget per cell. They can also be stacked, enabling exceptionally dense memory structures.
Memristor cells can also be built using exceedingly small fabrication processes. Using a grid of nanowires whose crossing points form the memristors, Williams told The New York Times that HP Labs has working devices with three-nanometer memristors that switch on and off in about a nanosecond and could store 20GB in a square centimeter.
HP has known for some time how memristors can store bits. Simply put, a charge applied to a memristor moves what Williams calls a “oxygen vacancy” from one layer of a titanium dioxide semiconductor to the other,…Read More at the source.
