Hewlett-Packard proves a miniature circuit could replace DRAM

"Memristors" are smaller than DRAM and consume less power.

By James Carbone -- Purchasing, 4/30/2008 2:33:00 PM

Memristors are not a myth, but a real possibility, according to scientists at Hewlett-Packard, who said this week they have proven the existence of the very tiny circuits that could replace DRAMs in computers.

The memristor (so-called because it is part memory, part resistor) would use less power than DRAMs and would be much smaller. According to a study published in the science journal Nature, the HP scientific team created working circuits based on memristors that are as small as 15 nanometers. The smallest chips today are 45 nanometers.

According to a statement from HP, memristors would have an advantage over DRAM because computers using DRAM lack the ability to retain information once they lose power. When power is restored to a DRAM-based computer, a slow, energy-consuming boot-up process is necessary to retrieve data from a magnetic disk required to run the system. In contrast, a memristor-based computer would retain its information after losing power and would not require the boot-up process, resulting in the consumption of less power.

The memristor may also make it possible to fashion advanced logic circuits such as field programmable gate arrays. The memristor was first theorized by Leon Chua at the University of California at Berkeley 37 years ago, according R. Stanley Williams who led the HP research team. Chua argued that the memristor was the fourth fundamental circuit element, along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor, and that it had properties that could not be duplicated by any combination of the other components. Williams and his team are the first to prove the existence of the memristor.