Hewlett-Packard Co researchers have unveiled new memory from a circuit that was once only a theory
By: Captain Maverick
Apr 30, 2008 01:56 AM GMT
Hewlett-Packard announced Wednesday that a team of its scientists have designed a simple circuit element that they believe will enable computers that are small enough and powerful enough that they could imitate biological functions. The device is called a memristor and could make it possible to build extremely dense computer memory chips that use far less power than today's memory chips, which are quickly reaching the limit of how small they cam be made.
According to the HP researchers, the discovery of the memory properties were in extremely thin spots of titanium dioxide, and came from a decade-long hunt for a new class of organic molecules to serve as nano-sized switches. The scientists were hoping to to be able to fashion switches about the size of a single molecule that could someday replace transistors once the semiconductor industry’s shrinking of electronic circuits made with photolithographic techniques reached a technological limit.
Potentially the chips will function like biological synapses making them ideal for many artificial intelligence applications. The memristor is basically an electrical resistor with memory properties. This discovery may make it possible to fashion advanced logic circuits known as filed programmable gate arrays. These are widely used for rapid prototyping of new circuits and for custom made chips that need to be created quickly.
The original memristor was written about in a a research paper done by a Berkeley electrical engineer named Leon Chua in 1971. His paper titled "Memristor - The Missing Circuit Element" argued that basic electronic theory required that in addition to the three basic elements - resistors, capacitors, and inductors - there is a fourth element that should exist, the memristor. And the HP team created working circuits based on memristors that are as small as 15 nanometers, but they believe that they will be able to make one as small as 4 nanometers.
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