HP shows off successor to the transistor

An HP memristor. The wires are about 50nm, or 150 atoms, wide

Researchers at HP's Information and Quantum Systems Lab have been showing off a new circuit that could replace the transistors used in all current processors.

The memristor is a resistor with memory which can be used to store and process data simultaneously. The HP team showed off an array of oxygen-depleted titanium dioxide memristors 150 atoms wide capable of logic operations and storage.

The memristors can be stacked for greater compression, and the researchers, led by HP Senior Fellow R. Stanley Williams, claimed that this would offer 10 times the storage and processing power of current chip architectures.

"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 specialised central processing unit," said Williams.

"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."

Williams has described the memristors as the fourth basic circuit in electrical engineering, the others being the resistor, capacitor and inductor.

The theory was first postulated in a 1971 academic paper by Leon Chua, professor of the Electrical Engineering And Computer Sciences Department at the University of California at Berkeley.

"Since our brains are made of memristors, the floodgate is now open for the commercialisation of computers that would compute like human brains, which is totally different from the von Neumann architecture underpinning all digital computers," Williams said.

Memristors use much less power than current transistors, and are immune from the cosmic radiation which causes occasional faults in RAM, and which is wor rying some in the industry.

"Cosmic ray-induced computer crashes have occurred and are expected to increase with frequency as devices (for example, transistors) decrease in size in chips. This problem is projected to become a major limiter of computer reliability in the next decade," said Intel in a recent patent filing.

HP said that the technology could be online within three years, and could eventually replace the transistors used in processors and screen displays.

"Memristors are allowing us to think about different ways of doing computing. And we are only just starting to really understand their long-term potential," said Williams.