Hewlitt Packard announces Working 3 Nanometer Memristors

Memristors are hitting the non-mainstream mainstream again with a concurrent widespread media blitz surrounding a recent Nature Journal Letter publication by the HP Team in this months issue… a long way from last years Organic Memristors and Adaptive Networks, but further along the road towards the social networks of things? From the NYTimes comes an interesting tidbit that Director Stan Williams mentions about the latest work at the 3-nanometer scale:

The most advanced transistor technology today is based on minimum feature sizes of 30 to 40 nanometers — by contrast a biological virus is typically about 100 nanometers — and Dr. Williams said that H.P. now has working 3-nanometer memristors that can switch on and off in about a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second. He said the company could have a competitor to flash memory in three years that would have a capacity of 20 gigabytes a square centimeter. [full article]

Now thats what the consumer market likes to call “Almost Edible”!

The Nature letter is titled “Memristive switches enable ‘stateful’ logic operations via material implication”, and details some possible methods for offloading both logic functions, and storage, onto the same memristor… wow. Just wow:

“Here we show that this family of nonlinear dynamical memory devices can also be used for logic operations: we demonstrate that they can execute material implication (IMP), which is a fundamental Boolean logic operation on two variables p and q such that pIMPq is equivalent to (NOTp)ORq. Incorporated within an appropriate circuit17, 18, memristive switches can thus perform ‘stateful’ logic operations for which the same devices serve simultaneously as gates (logic) and latches19 (memory) that use resistance instead of voltage or charge as the physical state variable.” [Full Nature Article (Fee)]