Chutneytech | UK Technology News

When Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev invented the periodic table in 1869 he prophesised that there were four as yet undiscovered elements. Many did not believe him but the four elements he described; scandium, gallium, technetium and germanium were soon discovered, matching his predictions exactly.

There aren’t many who have possessed the ability to so accurately predict discoveries in the future but Professor Leon  Chua of Berkeley College can now be included on the list based, on his prediction in 1971 that a fourth circuit element type would be added to the known three of resistor, capacitor and inductor. This fourth element he called a memristor, because it combines the electrical properties of a memory element and a resistor.

The memristor was first turned into reality by HP Labs in 2008 whose team of researchers led by R. Stanley Williams have now created architectures for memory chips using this fourth element. Because they can maintain their state when powered off, memristors are expected to allow faster and greater storage on a much smaller scale (holding double the data of flash memory) and with lower energy requirements. Unlike flash, which can only withstand around 100 000 read-write cycles, memristors have withstood around a million cycles in lab tests. According to Williams “We will be able to scale faster and farther than flash because the memristor is a very simple structure, and it can be stacked.”

Because memristors can maintain their state whilst powered off they could be used in a new type of computer memory that would replace D-RAM with something that would not require a slow, energy-consuming boot-up process - there would be no need to wait for data to be retrieved from magnetic storage.

Another big advantage of memristor devices is that they will be able to carry out both memory and logic functions at the same time – a lot of computing power and time is currently devoted to moving data between the two. These capabilities are expected to see a major increase in amount of computing power available to handheld devices in particular which would be able to offer 10 times the memory of today’s products and continuing Moore’s law in the process.

HP believes products with memristor chips could become commercially available in the next few years.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 10th, 2010 at 8:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.