H.P. Says New Device Could Transform Chip-Making - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/science/08chips.

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H.P. Sees a Revolution in Memory Chip

By JOHN MARKOFF Breaking News Alerts by E-Mail
Published: April 7, 2010 Sign up to be notified when important news breaks.

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Hewlett-Packard scientists on Thursday are to SIGN IN TO Privacy Policy
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report advances in the design of a new class of diminutive switches
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capable of replacing transistors as computer chips shrink closer to the
atomic scale. SIGN IN TO E-MAIL

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The devices, known as memristors, or REPRINTS
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memory resistors, were conceived in
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Get Science News From The 1971 by Leon O. Chua, an electrical
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engineer at the University of
California, Berkeley, but they were not
put into effect until 2008 at the H.P. lab here.

They are simpler than today’s semiconducting transistors, can store information even in
the absence of an electrical current and, according to a report in Nature, can be used for
both data processing and storage applications.

The researchers previously reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of

Sciences that they had devised a new method for storing and retrieving information from a
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vast three-dimensional array of memristors. The scheme could potentially free designers to
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stack thousands of switches in a high-rise fashion, permitting a new class of ultradense
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Memristor-based systems also hold out the prospect of fashioning analog computing 3. 10 Simple Google Search Tricks
systems that function more like biological brains, Dr. Chua said. 4. Interest Rates Have Nowhere to Go but Up
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“Our brains are made of memristors,” he said, referring to the function of biological 6. Building a Green Economy
synapses. “We have the right stuff now to build real brains.” 7. Tribes of Amazon Find an Ally Out of ‘Avatar’
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In an interview at the H.P. research lab, Stan Williams, a company physicist, said that in
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the two years since announcing working devices, his team had increased their switching
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speed to match today’s conventional silicon transistors. The researchers had tested them
in the laboratory, he added, proving they could reliably make hundreds of thousands of Go to Complete List »

reads and writes.

That is a significant hurdle to overcome, indicating that it is now possible to consider

memristor-based chips as an alternative to today’s transistor-based flash computer
memories, which are widely used in consumer devices like MP3 players, portable
computers and digital cameras.

“Not only do we think that in three years we can be better than the competitors,” Dr.
Williams said. “The memristor technology really has the capacity to continue scaling for a
very long time, and that’s really a big deal.”

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H.P. Says New Device Could Transform Chip-Making - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/science/08chips.html

As the semiconductor industry has approached fundamental physical limits in shrinking Another Cousteau working to save the waters
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the size of the devices that represent digital 1’s and 0’s as on and off states, it has touched
off an international race to find alternatives.

New generations of semiconductor technology typically advance at three-year intervals, ADVERTISEMENTS

and today the industry can see no further than three and possibly four generations into the
future. Follow us on Twitter

The most advanced transistor technology today is based on minimum feature sizes of 30 to
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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 See the news in the making. Watch
and off in about a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second. TimesCast, a daily news video.

He said the company could have a competitor to flash memory in three years that would Follow us on Twitter

have a capacity of 20 gigabytes a square centimeter.

“We believe that that is at least a factor of two better storage than flash memory will be
able to have in that time frame,” he said.

The H.P. technology is based on the ability to use an electrical current to move atoms
within an ultrathin film of titanium dioxide. After the location of an atom has been shifted,
even by as little as a nanometer, the result can be read as a change in the resistance of the
material. That change persists even after the current is switched off, making it possible to
build an extremely low-power device.

The new material offers an approach that is radically different from a promising type of
storage called “phase-change memory” being pursued by I.B.M., Intel and other
companies.

In a phase-change memory, heat is used to shift a glassy material from an amorphous to a

crystalline state and back. The switching speed of these systems is slower and requires
more power, the H.P. scientists say.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 8, 2010, on page B3

of the New York edition.

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