HP signs Hynix in bid to build memristor memory

 

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By Stewart Mitchell

Posted on 2 Sep 2010 at 14:35

HP is to link up with memory manufacturer Hynix Semiconductor to bring its memristor technology to market.

Only discovered in 2006, memristors represent a fourth basic passive circuit element - the others being resistors, capacitors and inductors - and HP believes chips created using the technology could run considerably faster and use much less energy than Flash memory technologies.

“This will change the memory industry, because it will allow us to continue scaling to higher densities, as with Flash, but actually with a product that has the capability to replace both hard disks and DRAM memory in computers,” said Stanley Williams, HP senior fellow.

The product itself will look like a Flash memory drive, with the same sort of things as we're used to using, such as memory sticks for computers and disks for cameras

“The product itself will look like a Flash memory drive, with the same sort of things as we're used to using, such as memory sticks for computers and disks for cameras.”

The deal with Hynix represents what HP sees as the fastest way to move the technology “from lab to fab”, and the company hopes to learn from the Korean manufacturer's fabrication expertise.

The pair will jointly develop memristor technology in the form of Resistive Random Access Memory (ReRAM), which HP said was a non-volatile memory built using materials that change resistance when a voltage is applied across them.

“People have been attempting to make resistive memory for a long time,” said Williams. “But because they didn’t understand that the devices they had were memristors, they weren’t making good progress. Once you understand the mathematical framework for memristors, you can design circuits that perform the way they are intended to perform.”

HP said its knowledge of memristors meant it could provide Hynix with everything the manufacturer needed to produce commercial chips as soon as 2013.

“It’s not just the memristor,” Williams said. “There’s also architecture, circuit design, error correction coding – we’re bringing the complete package.”

According to the companies, memristor memory chips have the potential to run at least ten times faster and use ten times less power than an equivalent Flash memory chip, and could offer twice the capacity for the same price.