Posted on 05/03/2008 2:41:08 PM PDT by neverdem
Memory plus resistor may add up to longer-lasting batteries and faster-booting computers
After nearly 40 years, researchers have discovered a new type of building block for electronic circuits. And there's at least a chance it will spare you from recharging your phone every other day. Scientists at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, Calif., report in Nature that a new nanometer-scale electric switch "remembers" whether it is on or off after its power is turned off. (A nanometer is one billionth of a meter.)
Researchers believe that the memristor, or memory resistor, might become a useful tool for constructing nonvolatile computer memory, which is not lost when the power goes off, or for keeping the computer industry on pace to satisfy Moore's law, the exponential growth in processing power every 18 months.
You may dimly recall circuit diagrams from your middle school science class; those little boxes with a battery on one end and a lightbulb on the other. Ring any bells? To an electrical engineer, the battery is a capacitor—a device for storing electric charge—and the lightbulb is a resistor—an obstacle to electric current. Until now, engineers have had only one other basic element to work with—the inductor, which turns current into a magnetic field.
In 1971 researcher Leon Chua of the University of California, Berkeley, noticed a gap in that list. Circuit elements express relationships between pairs of the four electromagnetic quantities of charge, current, voltage and magnetic flux. Missing was a link between charge and flux. Chua dubbed this missing link the memristor and created a crude example to demonstrate its key property: it becomes more or less resistive (less or more conductive) depending on the amount of charge that had flowed through it.
Physicist Stanley Williams of HP Labs says that after a colleague brought Chua's work to his attention, he saw that it would explain a variety of odd behaviors in electronic devices that his group and other nanotech researchers had built over the years. His "brain jolt" came, he says, when he realized that "to make a pure memristor you have to build it so as to isolate this memory function."
So he and his colleagues inserted a layer of titanium dioxide (TiO2) as thin as three nanometers between a pair of platinum layers [see image above]. Part of the TiO2 layer contained a sprinkling of positively charged divots (vacancies) where oxygen atoms would have normally been. They applied an alternating current to the electrode closer to these divots, causing it to swing between a positive and negative charge.
When positively charged, the electrode pushed the charged vacancies and spread them throughout the TiO2, boosting the current flowing to the second electrode. When the voltage reversed, it slashed the current a million-fold, the group reports. When the researchers turned the current off, the vacancies stopped moving, which left the memristor in either its high- or low-resistant state. "Our physics model tells us that the memristive state should last for years," Williams says.
Chua says he didn't expect anyone to make a memristor in his lifetime. "It's amazing," he says. "I had just completely forgotten it." He says the HP memristor has an advantage over other potential nonvolatile memory technologies because the basic manufacturing tools are already in place.
Williams adds that memristors could be used to speed up microprocessors by synchronizing circuits that tend to drift in frequency relative to one another or by doing the work of many transistors at once.
Whether industry will adopt it remains to be seen. In an editorial accompanying the paper, nanotech researchers James Tour and Tao He of Rice University in Houston note that "even to consider an alternative to the transistor is anathema to many device engineers, and the memristor concept will have a steep slope to climb towards acceptance."
But the memristor concept is a promising one, they wrote, adding: "It is often the simple ideas that stand the test of time."
It's better - it'll be adopted.
Only way it wouldn’t be is if something even better comes right behind it.
JRF is reminding me of my Grandfather, who argued that the Church didn’t need a chandelier because it was a waste of money and besides, we didn’t have anybody that could play one.
(Stern Face) Well, hell, son, can you play a chandelier? (I can, but I can't tell that story in mixed company)
I didn't mean to be a wet blanket, but just pointed out that inductive reactance, capacitive reactance, resistance, and switches have been de-reigure for lots of years, and survived tubes and transistors.
If someone has something new, bring it on. And prove it.
I honestly believe that this is an effect that doesn't actually warrant re-arranging my investment portfolio. And if it was, I would.
/johnny
Aluminum foil and wax paper works really well, unless the working voltage is too high.
:>)
/johnny
QRP, antenna design, and narrow bandwidth stuff is the 'unexplored territory' for modern day radio operators.
73
/johnny
Thanks. B4L8r
The level of discussion on this is pretty high (beyond my mortal ken)once you figure out who is serious and who is not. There are lots of poseurs there but its worth wading through it if you find this an interesting topic.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/30/211228
Thanks for the ping to this.
I am going to have to study this for a time. In addition to the concept, I am pretty skeptical about the process to make this industrially. I don’t mean to say I don’t think it can be done industrially, but that the road to practicality may be longer than anticipated. For certain, though, this industry has made so many unexpected strides so rapidly that it has often swept skepticism aside as easily as I sweep cobwebs away.
Memristor ... Years from now, I’ll have to say that I heard it here first.
BUY HP ...
Great observation!
It is a reprogrammable resistor, requiring just a brief flux of current to reprogram it.
-—<>-—<>-—<>-—<>-—<>-—
Possibly, more like a reprogrammable circuit array in practice. Choose which circuits you wish to “activate” right now. That could be “memory” or it could be logic circuits. This technology is likely to make current day PLA’s absolutely archaic, and open up nearly infinite possibility at the scale being discussed. Clock rates? Who needs a clock? I’m getting more excited about this the more I mull it over.
As Robert said earlier: Buy HP.
Thanks for linking this article. I hope it stays available for a long time. One of the most exciting comments made that I immediately said, YEAH to was, “This is Nobel Prize-worthy stuff we’re talking about.”
I think we’re likely to see that within FIVE years... this is really, really big.
In addition, someone spoke about “bring back analogue computers”... That could well be true, too. That could be HUGE in certain applications.
“After reading the few articles, wikipedia and the available information from HP, it looks more like a generational change in technology rather than just a new kind of memory. I think the Nature article’s wording of discovery is correct here, this looks like an interesting piece of base research with large real world applications, instead of a specific invention to store things.”
A second great observation here. I suspect applications of this will take a generation or two (of people, not technology) before the ultimate ramifications of this technology are close to understood.
I keep looking for someone named Noonian Singh or Lawrence Robertson associated with it
Devices with new useful properties, improved economics of production, and substantially smaller scale and lower power requirements can create long term disruptions in computer technology, and even associated markets and businesses.
Usually one is surprised at how little difference such devices make in the short term (the first few years) and how massively (and delightfully, for lifetime geeks like me) disruptive they are in the longer term.
Some individual people will make the transition to making good use of these fairly quickly. But groups of people, companies, divisions, business models, high volume factories and product markets take longer to transition. And the people who are on the leading edge of inventing really new ways of using these devices may come from rather unrelated backgrounds.
I wouldn't necessarily buy HP on this however, for three reasons.
Oh, I agree completely with you.
This could take quite a while to implement, as I said, probably two generations, but this is absolutely going to win a Nobel Prize, and be as world changing as the transistor.
I witnessed the operation of an analogue computer back in the 60s. I don’t know whether they would for sure outstrip digital devices for anything we want to compute now, but if they could, this device will allow them to be built.
As I said, I think this will revolutionize Logic Grids we now use PLA’s for.
It will revolutionize “breadboarding” circuits
I can think of so many things so fast and I’m not even in this field (of electronics) ...
Saying “Memory devices” as the application is just so very short sighted about the application that it is almost criminal...
aha! a ping to one of these easy/basic/no - brain threads
/sarc
I REALLY admire you scientists! I was a biologist in another life & so do have a healthy respect for all of this even though it is a weeee litttttle bit elusive to me.
The closest I can come to understanding this is to think maybe the technology was used in Ironman?
Am I impressing you?
LOL.. forwarding to my dear nephew Jason, who is very bright & WILL understand this - right now however with the brief review, I must say I have NOT given the infor a chance to sink in..
IonImplantGuru hasn’t chmed in yet; the manufacturability of this item is wholly unknown.
Then how does one reset the operating system? ;-P
(Yes, I'm sarcastically baiting my Windows!)
By “resetting” the memristors to default value, I would guess :^)
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