Blog: Memristor Processor Solves Mazes

Memristor Processor Solves Mazes
Technology Review (03/03/11)

Yuriy Pershin at the University of South Carolina and Massimiliano Di Ventra at the University of California, San Diego have developed a memristor processor that solves mazes. The researchers connect a voltage across the start and finish of the graphical puzzle and wait. "The current flows only along those memristors that connect the entrance and exit points," say Pershin and Di Ventra. The state of memristors change, enabling them to be easily identified--and a chain of memristors is a potential solution that would be much quicker than maze-solving strategies, which effectively work in series. "The maze is solved in a massively parallel way, since all memristors in the network participate simultaneously in the calculation," Pershin and Di Ventra say. They have conducted a test with a memristor simulator and believe that implementing the device in silicon will become easier over time. With the new approach, the network structure and layout take part in calculating, not just the memristors.

View Full Article