Finding the Missing Memristor - R. Stanley Williams

This is an interesting implementation of the memristor, but I still think the real breakthrough will be in the two state memristor [1]. Once memristor fabrication technology is mature, we are going to see a massive paradigm shift away from the Von Neumann architecture. All the details are in the linked video by HP's Stan Williams. Definitely worth a watch if you're interested in the future of computing 1. ▶ this video (start at 38m for future computing implications) EDIT: Another video [2], but a bit more in depth. Recommended if the material in the first was a bit confusing as Stan was short on time to explain some of the details. 2. link

I encourage folks to watch this tech talk by HP Research Labs on the discovery of the memristor and implementation details. It goes into the gory technical details, from the low level physics to the construction of the gates, the truth tables, and the high level computation possibilities once chips are assembled in a crossbar package. > ▶ this video

How i learned to stop worrying and love the miniaturization: ▶ this video Seriously, watch it. Memristor-tech relies on this kind of miniaturization and can provide a speed boost in several areas in current architectures. Secondly, having worked for semi: there's a lot of conservative force holding back development. We could have had current tech with much less worries than we have now if they didn't respond so allergically to everything that looks a little exotic in the CMOS process, like high-k dielectrics.

We may actually see them both happening at once; one of the things R. Stanley Williams talks about in his excellent memristor talk is a method they developed for stacking hundreds of chips on top of a processor, which he says may end up providing just as much benefit as the memristor itself. The possibilities that could be opened up by having a terabyte or more of extremely fast non volatile storage attached by a bus as large as you care to make it directly on top of a CPU are mind boggling. Then when you consider that you can use them as FPGAs for computation instead and dynamically reconfigure them... wow. Memristors are only a year or two away from commercial availability, though it will probably be a while after that until they live up to the hype. We live in exciting times. The talk: ▶ this video

I don't understand why Leon Chua keeps popping up first when memristors are discussed. Williams at HP is the person that made it a reality. Chua postulated the existence of the memristor but as far as I know made no progress on a working example. That's a bit like giving da Vinci credit for the invention of the helicopter. The Williams talk on youtube is really good. He discusses the element itself, its use in memory (as vast amounts of on-CPU memory) as well as the possibility of new CPU architectures based on it: ▶ this video

There's a presentation by R. Stanley Williams linked to in the article, and it is well worth watching. ▶ this video It has some tidbits I didn't expect. Teaser: "one of the guys in my group has...built a compiler to compile C code using implication logic rather than NAND logic and, interestingly enough, when we play with that the compiled code we get is always more condensed...by about a factor of 3"

The top comment mentions DARPA research, but for those who are actually interested in the theory behind the memristor and its potential applications, here [1] is an excellent resource by the man who discovered the first physical memristor. Furthermore, there is a huge amount of open access journal articles and wikipedia material on memristors. DARPA is nowhere close to the cutting edge, SK Hynix is already tooling ReRAM fabs for mass production. 1. ▶ this video

What don't you buy about them being the fourth fundamental circuit type? Its mathematically provable, proven in the 60's actually. Here watch this for a decent introduction. ▶ this video

If you want to see something awesome HP has done "recently" check out this talk on memristors. Other than that I don't know... ▶ this video

> Historically, electrical circuits were crafted with three basic building blocks: the capacitor, the resistor, and the inductor. But in 1971, University of California at Berkeley professor Leon Chua predicted the existence of a fourth: the memristor, short for memory resistor. > Then, in May of 2008, HP announced that it had actually built a memristor, thanks to HP Labs Fellow R. Stanley Williams and others working in the company’s research arm. Here's a great presentation from R. Stanley Williams[1], via prior discussion at HN[2]. [1] ▶ this video [2] link

Here's a useful, but lengthy, talk on the subject: ▶ this video Memristors look extremely likely to be able to provide non-volatile storage with latency, access speeds, and density higher than existing DRAM and flash. They also look like they can be used to make FPGA-like devices which can approach the speed, power efficiency, and logic density of custom designed ASICs but with extremely fast reconfiguration speed. And those seem to be the less fascinating aspects of memristor technology.

Watch HP research's Stanley Williams describe the memristor and what they are working towards in more detail on YouTube: ▶ this video