A report at The Register talks about HP’s new leads in the development of the “memristor”:
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.
Of course, this is all still in the research lab, so don’t expect to see memristor technology show up in your next tablet or smartphone. It could be several years before the new tech becomes widely available.
