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MIT engineers have designed a "brain-on-a-chip," smaller than a piece of confetti, that is made from tens of thousands of artificial brain synapses known as memristors—silicon-based components that mimic the information-transmitting synapses in the human brain. The researchers borrowed from principles of metallurgy to fabricate each memristor from alloys of silver and copper, along with silicon. When they ran the chip through several visual tasks, the chip was able to "remember" stored images and reproduce them many times over, in versions that were crisper and cleaner compared with existing memristor designs made with unalloyed elements. Their results, published today in...

Hewlett-Packard has kicked off an ambitious project that aims at nothing less than reinventing the basic architecture of computers. It looks like servers are its initial target, but HP is also working on an Android version that it says could lead to smartphones with 100TB of storage. HP said Wednesday it was working on a new computer architecture, dubbed The Machine, based on memristors and silicon photonics. Bloomberg Businessweek reports up to 75% of HP’s once fairly illustrious R&D division — HP Labs – are working on The Machine. In the words of HP Labs, The Machine will be a...

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—A cat can recognize a face faster and more efficiently than a supercomputer. That's one reason a feline brain is the model for a biologically-inspired computer project involving the University of Michigan. U-M computer engineer Wei Lu has taken a step toward developing this revolutionary type of machine that could be capable of learning and recognizing, as well as making more complex decisions and performing more tasks simultaneously than conventional computers can. Lu previously built a "memristor," a device that replaces a traditional transistor and acts like a biological synapse, remembering past voltages it was subjected to. Now,...

Scientists at Rice University and Hewlett-Packard are reporting this week that they can overcome a fundamental barrier to the continued rapid miniaturization of computer memory that has been the basis for the consumer electronics revolution. In recent years the limits of physics and finance faced by chip makers had loomed so large that experts feared a slowdown in the pace of miniaturization that would act like a brake on the ability to pack ever more power into ever smaller devices like laptops, smartphones and digital cameras. But the new announcements, along with competing technologies being pursued by companies like IBM...

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,...

Sitting patiently before your computer as it boots up could soon be a thing of the past following the discovery of a new basic type of electrical circuit by electronics heavyweight Hewlett-Packard (HP). According to the basics of electronic theory, there are three fundamental elements involved in the function of a passive electrical circuit, namely resistors, capacitors and inductors. However, after four decades of searching, HP scientists are now claiming to have found a potentially significant fourth element. The Hewlett-Packard research team, led by Stanley Williams, has this week announced it has proven the existence of the “memristor” (memory resistor)...