MESSAGE
| DATE | 2008-04-30 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] More Human Memory from HP
|
HP Researchers Build Intelligent Memory
Agam Shah, IDG News Service Related Articles:
Find a Review Wednesday, April 30, 2008 5:50 PM PDT
Researchers at Hewlett-Packard have developed a working unit of a memory
circuit that has existed in theory for 37 years, which could ultimately
replace RAM and make computers more intelligent by tracking data it
has retained.
The technology, called memristor, could allow computers to make decisions
by understanding past patterns of data it has collected, similar to
human brains collecting and understanding a series of events.
For example, a memristor circuit could be capable of telling a microwave
the heating time for different food types based on the information it
has collected over time, said Stanley Williams, senior fellow at HP.
A memristor circuit requires lower voltage and less time to turn on
than competitive memory like DRAM and flash, Williams said. "Because it
[uses] less voltage and less time, of course, it uses much less power,"
Williams said. Denser cells also allow memristor circuits to store more
data than flash memory.
Through prototypes, HP is trying to show circuit designers what memristor
is capable of doing. "What we have done is confirmed a concept for a
new electronic device that was originally proposed nearly 40 years ago,"
Williams said.
Memristor is the fourth fundamental circuit element, joining the other
three -- resistor, capacitor and inductor -- that had been known for
150 years, Williams said. The element has properties that cannot be
duplicated by any combination of the other three elements, Williams said.
"It is as fundamental to electronic engineering as a chemical element
is to chemistry or an electron is to physics," Williams said.
In a 1971 academic paper, Leon Chua, a mathematician and professor at
the University of California at Berkeley, wrote that memristor would have
properties similar to a synapse in a brain. The synapse makes connections
between two neurons, and the more often a signal is sent to a synapse,
the stronger the synapse gets.
"That is a very different type of behavior than anything that had been
observed before in circuit elements," Williams said.
HP is not going to reproduce all the functions of a brain in memristor,
but the company is trying to build a relatively simple computing machine
that operates on a different principle from today's computers, Williams
said.
The scientists created the memory by applying a charge on a circuit
with blocks of titanium dioxide. The actual resistance of the memristor
changes depending on the amount of current flowing through the circuit,
Williams said. When the current is turned off, the memory retains the
information it has acquired.
Although the concept of memristor has existed for a while, the
memory prototype is an academic device that will first work its way to
academia. It could hit the commercial semiconductor market in five years,
Williams said.
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