HP Labs Discovery Holds Potential to Fundamentally Change Computer System Design

“Memristor” could enable computation on memory chips

PALO ALTO, Calif., HP today announced advancements in research from HP Labs – the company’s central research arm – that could change the way computer systems are designed while better equipping them to process the current “information explosion.”

HP Labs researchers have discovered that the “memristor“ – a resistor with memory that represents the fourth basic circuit element in electrical engineering – has more capabilities than was previously thought. In addition to being useful in storage devices, the memristor can perform logic, enabling computation to one day be performed in chips where data is stored, rather than on a specialized central processing unit.

Highlights

* The latest findings about the memristor are detailed in a paper published this week in the journal “Nature” by six researchers at HP’s Information and Quantum Systems Lab, led by R. Stanley Williams. These developments follow the HP Labs team’s first demonstration of the existence of the memristor in 2008.
* HP has created development-ready architectures for memory chips using memristors and believes it is possible that devices incorporating the element could come to market within the next few years.
* HP researchers also have designed a new architecture within which multiple layers of memristor memory can be stacked on top of each other in a single chip. In five years, such chips could be used to create handheld devices that offer ten times greater embedded memory than exists today or to power supercomputers that allow work like movie rendering and genomic research to be done dramatically faster than Moore’s Law suggests is possible.
* Eventually, memristor-based processors might replace the silicon in the smart display screens found in e-readers and could one day even become the successors to silicon on a larger scale.

Memristor chips and energy use

* Memristors require less energy to operate and are faster than present solid-state storage technologies such as flash memory, and they can store at least twice as much data in the same area.
* Memristors are virtually immune from radiation, which can disrupt transistor-based technologies – making them an attractive way to enable ever smaller but ever more powerful devices.
* Because they do not “forget,” memristors can enable computers that turn on and off like a light switch.

Supporting quotes

“Memristive devices could change the standard paradigm of computing by enabling calculations to be performed in the chips where data is stored rather than in a specialized central processing unit. Thus, we anticipate the ability to make more compact and power-efficient computing systems well into the future, even after it is no longer possible to make transistors smaller via the traditional Moore’s Law approach.”

– R. Stanley Williams, senior fellow and director, Information and Quantum Systems Lab, HP

“Since our brains are made of memristors, the flood gate is now open for commercialization of computers that would compute like human brains, which is totally different from the von Neumann architecture underpinning all digital computers.”

– Leon Chua, professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department, University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Chua initially theorized about and named the memristor in an academic paper published 39 years ago.

Images and videos

* Photo of the memristor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Memristor.jpg
* IEEE Spectrum’s “Six-Minute Memristor Guide”: Stan Williams gives a whiteboard talk about how the memristor works:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvA5r4LtVnc
* “The Next Step in Revolutionary Electronics”: Video about the discovery of the memristor, produced by The Next Step:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZAHG3COYYA

Links

* Article about memristor on the HP Labs website:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2010/apr-jun/memristor.html
* FAQ on memristor:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2008/apr-jun/memristor_faq.html
* Memristor named one of “Wired” magazine’s “Top Technology Breakthroughs of 2008”:
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2008/12/YE8_techbreaks?currentPage=all

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