Research: H.P. Reports Big Advance in Memory Chip Design

H.P. Reports Big Advance in Memory Chip Design
New York Times (05/01/08) P. C4; Markoff, John

Hewlett-Packard scientists have developed a memristor, an electrical resistor with memory properties that could be used to build very dense computer member chips that require far less power than DRAM memory chips. The memristor could also be used to create field programmable arrays. Meanwhile, memristors' ability to store and retrieve a variety of intermediate values, not just the binary 1s and 0s used in conventional chips, could enable them to function like biological synapses, which would make them ideal for artificial intelligence applications such as machine vision and understanding speech. Independent researchers say the memristor could quickly be applied to computer memory, but other applications could be more challenging. Hewlett-Packard's quantum science research group director R. Stanley Williams says the technology should be commercialized fairly quickly. The memristor was first predicted in 1971 by University of California, Berkeley electrical engineer Leon Chua, who says he had not worked on the idea for several decades and he was surprised when Hewlett-Packard contacted him a few months ago. The researchers have successfully created working circuits based on memristors that are as small as 15 nanometers, and Williams says it will eventually be possible to make memristors as small as about four nanometers. In comparison, the smallest components in today's semiconductors are 45 nanometers, and the industry does not see a way of shrinking silicon-based chips below about 20 nanometers.
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