Palo Alto, Calif. — Heralded as a new technology to deliver more energy-efficient computing, HP has entered into a joint development agreement with Hynix Semiconductor Inc. (Icheon, Korea) to bring the memristor — a new circuit element first demonstrated in HP Labs — to market in future memory products.
What is a memristor? The memristor, short for “memory resistor,” was touted as the fourth basic circuit element by Prof. Leon Chua of the University of California at Berkeley in 1971 and first demonstrated by researchers in HP Labs, in 2006.
HP says memristors require less energy to operate, are faster than present solid-state storage technologies and can retain information even when power is off. Earlier this year, HP also announced that the memristor can perform logic, showing that memristor-based devices could change the standard paradigm of computing by enabling computation to one day be performed in chips where data is stored, rather than on a specialized central processing unit.
The image shows a circuit with 17 memristors captured by an atomic force microscope. Each memristor is composed of two layers of titanium dioxide sandwiched between two wires. When a voltage is applied to the top wire of a memristor, the electrical resistance of the titanium dioxide layers is changed, which can be used as a method to store a bit of data.
The HP and Hynix will jointly develop new materials and process integration technology to transfer the memristor technology from research to commercial development in the form of resistive random access memory (ReRAM). Hynix will implement the memristor technology in its research and development fab.
The ReRAM is defined as a non-volatile memory with low power consumption that holds the potential to replace Flash memory currently used in mobile phones and MP3 players. It also has the potential to serve as a universal storage medium, which means the memory can behave as Flash, DRAM or even a hard drive.
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