From HP, that is.
Ever since Paul Perez, then Chief Technology Officer of HP StorageWorks told me about the memristor a couple of years ago, I have been most interested in it. At that time, he said that while HP was looking at it, commercial availability was indeterminate.
Paul was way too circumspect.
In a bombshell last week, Stan Williams, Senior Fellow at HP, disclosed that HP is planning to have a flash-replacement chip on the market within 18 months, and possibly an SSD replacement drive as well. And that is not all. they also intent to replace DRAM and SRAM.
"We’re planning to put a replacement chip on the market to go up against flash within a year and a half, and we also intend to have an SSD replacement available in a year and a half. In 2014 possibly, or certainly by 2015, we will have a competitor for DRAM and then we’ll replace SRAM." R Stanley Williams, Senior Fellow, HP.
This is excellent news.
However, I am sure you as asking yourself, just what is a memristor?
Technically, a memristor, or memory resistor, is is a passive two-terminal electrical component in which there is a functional relationship between electric charge and magnetic flux linkage. When current flows in one direction through the device, the electrical resistance increases; and when current flows in the opposite direction, the resistance decreases.[1] When the current is stopped, the component retains the last resistance that it had, and when the flow of charge starts again, the resistance of the circuit will be what it was when it was last active.[2] It has a regime of operation with an approximately linear charge-resistance relationship as long as the time-integral of the current stays within certain bounds.[3] From Wikipedia.
For us mere mortals, a memristor is a new memory technology faster and more durable than current flash memory, and in certain instances, allow for logic to be embedded as well.
According to Williams, this new development will turn Moore’s Law completely upside down.
Think about it: if you are already impressed with the responsiveness that is achievable with Windows 8 using current generation technology, just imagine how must more ecstatic you would be with memristor-based computing.
More here
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Electronics Weekly: IEF2011: HP to replace flash and SSD in 2013
