Hewlett Packard and South Korean chip manufacturers Hynix are getting ready to commercialize a new kind of computer memory – memristors, a technology that up until now has only been available for experimental academic, industrial, and military applications.
The idea behind this new kind of memory is not particularly new, and was initially proposed back in 1971 by University of California professor Leon Chua. In a bold proposal, Chua talked of a fourth basic circuit element – the memristor, to go alongside the resistor, capacitor, and inductor. Memristor is short for memory resistor, and works as an alternative to the transistor.
The ideas behind this technology have laid dormant since this time, until 2006 when Hewlett Packard found a way to use it in a practical setting. Lots of research has been carried out since then, but only now are we beginning to see the possibility of the commercial integration of memristor technology. Initially, memristors are most likely to be used as nonvolatile memory, however in time they may also play a role in microprocessors and other kinds of computer chips.
While computer technology is constantly being improved and refined, the introduction of technology based on entirely new ideas is still quite rare. The introduction of such a basic new technology is even rarer, and could have massive implications on the way computer memory is built and defined in the very near future.
Memristors are able to easily outperform flash memory, with switches able to turn on and off 100 times faster using only a tenth of the energy. With this recent announcement by H.P on Tuesday, more research is likely to take place, and the speeds can only get even faster and more efficient. Hynix have agreed to build computer memories using this technology, and have said that commercial memristor-based products will be available in three years.
