HP’s central research arm – HP Labs – detailed advancements in research on its “memristor” that it believes could change the way computer systems are designed and better equipping them to process the explosion of data that devices must deal with today.

HP said its lab researchers have discovered that the resistor with memory (memristor), which represents the fourth basic circuit element in electrical engineering, can not only be useful in storage devices, but can also perform logic. This means that computation one day could be performed in chips where the data is stored, rather than on a specialized central processing unit.

These latest memristor findings are detailed in a paper published this week in the journal “Nature” by six researchers at HP’s Information and Quantum Systems Lab, led by R. Stanley Williams. The HP Labs team’s first demonstration of the existence of the memristor was in 2008.

“Memristive devices could change the standard paradigm of computing by enabling calculations to be performed in the chips where data is stored rather than in a specialized central processing unit. Thus, we anticipate the ability to make more compact and power-efficient computing systems well into the future, even after it is no longer possible to make transistors smaller via the traditional Moore’s Law approach,” said Williams, senior fellow and director of HP’s Information and Quantum Systems Lab, in a statement.

HP said it has created development-ready architectures for memory chips using memristors and asserted that it is possible that devices incorporating the element could come to market within the next few years.

Also, HP said its researchers have designed a new architecture within which multiple layers of memristor memory can be stacked on top of each other in a single chip. These chips could be used to create handheld devices that offer ten times greater embedded memory than exists today or to power supercomputers that allow work like movie rendering and genomic research to be done dramatically faster than Moore’s Law suggests is possible, in five years.

The company expects that memristor-based processors might eventually replace the silicon in the smart display screens found in e-readers and could one day even become the successors to silicon on a larger scale.

On an energy basis, HP pointed out that memristors require less energy to operate and are faster than present solid-state storage technologies such as flash memory, and can store at least twice as much data in the same area.

Given that memristors are virtually immune from radiation that can disrupt transistor-based technologies; they are an attractive way to allow ever-smaller but ever-more-powerful devices. And because they do not “forget,” memristors can allow computers that turn on and off like a light switch.

“Since our brains are made of memristors, the flood gate is now open for commercialization of computers that would compute like human brains, which is totally different from the von Neumann architecture underpinning all digital computers,” added Leon Chua, professor of the electrical engineering and computer sciences department at the University of California at Berkeley.

Interestingly, Dr. Chua theorized about and named the memristor in an academic paper published 39 years ago.

By: DocMemory
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