NY Times
SAN FRANCISCO — Hewlett-Packard said Tuesday that it would commercialize a new computer memory technology with Hynix, the South Korean chip maker.
Hynix’s agreement to build computer memories using a technology H.P. scientists developed called memristors indicates that more computer memory will be packed in even smaller devices in the second half of this decade. The two companies said the memristors will be commercially available in about three years.
To date, the memristor’s most likely application is for dense nonvolatile memories, which is what is used in flash memory cards for products like cameras and PCs. It is not out of the question, however, that it might play a role in other kinds of chips, including microprocessors, in the future.
The agreement to build the memory chips validates the work of Leon O. Chua, a University of California, Berkeley, electrical engineering professor. In 1971, he proposed a fourth basic circuit element (the other three are the resistor, capacitor and inductor) and called it a memristor, or memory resistor, as a simpler alternative to transistors. The idea languished for many years before a team of H.P. researchers found a way to use it in 2006. Since then, memristors have attracted industrial, academic and military interest, but have not gone beyond being laboratory curiosities.
Competing in the memory business will not be an easy battle. Memristors are still viewed as laboratory and academic experiments by the majority of the world’s leading semiconductor firms, most of whom have settled on a competing technology known as Phase Change Memory, or P.C.M. However, H.P. scientists said they traveled the world discussing memristors with all of the leading chip makers before settling on their commercial development agreement with Hynix, the world’s second-largest maker of memory chips behind Samsung Electronics.
“Right now the memristor outperforms flash,” said Stan Williams, an H.P. Labs scientist who has led the development effort. He said the tiny switches could be turned on and off more than 100 times as fast as flash, use a tenth of the energy and have a much greater lifespan.
The storage densities are already staggering and will become even more impressive in the future. Next year the most advanced flash storage chips will have a capacity of roughly 64 billion bits per square centimeter, according to the industry’s annual road map. By 2014, that is expected to increase to 170 billion bits per square inch. Rice University scientists said that memristive storage devices could be five times as dense as the industry standard in 2014 and that the technology was more easily adaptable to three-dimensional packaging. That would make it possible to build even vastly denser chips.
H.P. researchers have described ways to design 1,000-layer memristor-based chips, although they acknowledged that with current manufacturing techniques such devices would not be practical.
Hynix’s agreement to build computer memories using a technology H.P. scientists developed called memristors indicates that more computer memory will be packed in even smaller devices in the second half of this decade. The two companies said the memristors will be commercially available in about three years.
To date, the memristor’s most likely application is for dense nonvolatile memories, which is what is used in flash memory cards for products like cameras and PCs. It is not out of the question, however, that it might play a role in other kinds of chips, including microprocessors, in the future.
The agreement to build the memory chips validates the work of Leon O. Chua, a University of California, Berkeley, electrical engineering professor. In 1971, he proposed a fourth basic circuit element (the other three are the resistor, capacitor and inductor) and called it a memristor, or memory resistor, as a simpler alternative to transistors. The idea languished for many years before a team of H.P. researchers found a way to use it in 2006. Since then, memristors have attracted industrial, academic and military interest, but have not gone beyond being laboratory curiosities.
Competing in the memory business will not be an easy battle. Memristors are still viewed as laboratory and academic experiments by the majority of the world’s leading semiconductor firms, most of whom have settled on a competing technology known as Phase Change Memory, or P.C.M. However, H.P. scientists said they traveled the world discussing memristors with all of the leading chip makers before settling on their commercial development agreement with Hynix, the world’s second-largest maker of memory chips behind Samsung Electronics.
“Right now the memristor outperforms flash,” said Stan Williams, an H.P. Labs scientist who has led the development effort. He said the tiny switches could be turned on and off more than 100 times as fast as flash, use a tenth of the energy and have a much greater lifespan.
The storage densities are already staggering and will become even more impressive in the future. Next year the most advanced flash storage chips will have a capacity of roughly 64 billion bits per square centimeter, according to the industry’s annual road map. By 2014, that is expected to increase to 170 billion bits per square inch. Rice University scientists said that memristive storage devices could be five times as dense as the industry standard in 2014 and that the technology was more easily adaptable to three-dimensional packaging. That would make it possible to build even vastly denser chips.
H.P. researchers have described ways to design 1,000-layer memristor-based chips, although they acknowledged that with current manufacturing techniques such devices would not be practical.
