

Scientists Create First Memristor: Missing Fourth Electronic Circuit Element - Alex3917
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/04/scientists-prov.html

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rms
This should really have a lot more upvotes; this is pretty enormous. Maybe
Kurzweil is right after all...

Slashdot comments are decent.

[http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?threshold=3&mod...](http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?threshold=3&mode=thread&commentsort=0&op=Change&sid=539458)

Here is the Nature paper: <http://www.scribd.com/doc/2764516/nature06932>

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Alex3917
The way I'm reading this, our storage capacity today is basically like a
bubble wand or a carpenter's level. If you tilt the right side down then the
bubble goes all the way up on the left, and if you tilt the left side down
then the bubble goes all the way up on the right. This means that bubble wand
can hold two values, 0 and 1. With this new process you can essentially tilt
the wand a few degrees and have the bubble move only a couple inches and then
stop, and then tilt the wand a few more degrees and have the bubble move a
little more.

In this way you can store any value within a single "box." So instead of it
taking 64 "boxes" to store 64 bits, with this new process we can essentially
store this much information in a single box. And furthermore, each box is
going to be an order of magnitude smaller than our existing boxes today.

This may well be the single most important day of our lives, technologically
at least. The singularity is indeed near.

~~~
anamax
It's possible to store multiple bits in lots of devices, including capacitors
and inductors. Intel has been shipping flash that stores multiple bits per
cell for quite some time.

There's an interesting tradeoff between the size of the box, the number of
bits, and the required detector. And, if you're going small enough, the charge
of an electron.

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rms
This is so big, it's tough to imagine our memristor based future. Please
speculate wildly about humanity in the Memristor Age.

I don't think we'll have any keeping up with Moore's Law. In 5 years memristor
storage will be everywhere. IBM will develop memristor processors for the Blue
Brain project.

~~~
mxh
"This is so big, it's tough to imagine our memristor based future. Please
speculate wildly about humanity in the Memristor Age."

Not since the inductor was discovered has there been such cause for rejoicing.

My guess is that people in this glorious new age will continue to be, by
turns, noble, venal, kind, warlike, selfish, generous, stupid, wise,
thoughtful and ignorant, and that life will go on much as it always has.

I find it hard to believe that _this_ discovery/invention (as opposed to, say,
the transistor, fission, the steam engine, the telegraph, quantum mechanics,
et-bloody-cetera) is really going to alter the human experience for all time.

We will, however, have smaller iPods. And this is a cool discovery.

From a narrow, self-interested perspective, I wonder if this will end up
having any impact on how computers look to the programmer. I'd guess not; I
think this stuff will be used to make faster/smaller versions of what we
already have, in much the same way the last 30 years of advances in processor
design were used to make really fast IA instruction set chips. If I'm wrong,
though, it'll be interesting learning how to program the things.

~~~
mojuba
_I wonder if this will end up having any impact on how computers look to the
programmer._

RAM is nothing more than just a cache mechanism for slower storage devices,
and as such it could have been made transparent from the programming
perspective (roughly the same way as other caching devices - Cache Level 1 ...
Cache Level N, CPU registers).

The reasons RAM is still directly programmable are probably historical rather
than technical. There is clearly a tendency though in many modern dynamic
languages to hide direct memory allocation from the programmer.

So, my first guess is, memristors won't affect much the world of garbage-
collected dynamic languages - they are sort of ahead of time already.

There is an interesting perspective, however, if you look at the OS level.

Firstly, some part of the file system which is read-only - mostly code - will
not be copied or "loaded" anymore, it will be read directly by the CPU from
where it lies in the FS.

Another important change here would be that memory pointers will persist. It
is difficult to speculate on the possible impact, but it may be huge. It may
even give rise to new programming languages - with or without direct pointer
manipulation, I don't know.

As for data files, my guess is that "open", "save" and other common verbs will
be eliminated. Instead, we'll work directly on the file and the system will
somehow keep the modification history (and here's where the analog nature of
memristors might help, or maybe not).

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gaika
They should have called it flux capacitor, because that's what it is.

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aswanson
"Building an analog computer in which you don't use 1s and 0s and instead use
essentially all shades of gray in between is one of the things we're already
working on," says Williams. These computers could do the types of things that
digital computers aren't very good at –- like making decisions, determining
that one thing is larger than another, or even learning."

How else do they think analog computers worked in the first place?:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computers>

You can implement that stuff with caps, op amps and resistors. I don't know,
maybe the substances they use have better differential nonlinearity
characteristics across temperature.

All you need is a transistor and the proper bias voltage to create a simple
analog computer.

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hugh
OK, I've finally finished reading the Nature paper. To me the interesting, yet
bothersome, thing about this design is that in contrast to the past fifty
years of trends in electronics, it actually has moving parts. We're not just
sloshing electrons around the place, we're actually moving dopant atoms
through an amorphous solid, by applying ridiculously enormous electric fields.
My worry is whether this will wind up being durable, or whether the response
is going to change after these atoms have been yanked back and forth a few
billion times. The paper certainly doesn't say anything about extensively
testing these systems.

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mleonhard
This discovery should lead to very cheap NVRAM. What new ways of doing
business will arise when a computer with 32x4GHz cores and 16 TB of memory
costs $2000 TCO/year?

Disks will no longer be the performance bottleneck of cutting edge systems.
Instead it will be network latency. I think that a very important problem will
be the geographic distribution of information to minimize latency for users
and maintaining consistency of those replicas.

Additionally, the current model of software installation will become obsolete.
A very important current problem is how to deliver applications over the
network with good performance and stability. I think that we need something
better than the browser/DOM/JavaScript and the proprietary offerings from
Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun.

These are two important problems that I am studying. What hard problems are
you working on?

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muerdeme
_In fact, you can use any fab to make these things right now_

Whoa. I didn't expect to hear that.

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jrockway
_Researchers believe the discovery will pave the way for instant-on PCs, more
energy-efficient computers, and new analog computers that can process and
associate information in a manner similar to that of the human brain._

It will also bring about world peace and time travel.

~~~
Hexstream
Here's hoping! ;P

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ashu
Some more details here:
[http://eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=...](http://eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=5TEHPR2H5S0WGQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=207403521)

~~~
gaika
Author is clueless: "changes in voltage, or flux" - in this case flux is not
change in voltage, but magnetic field.

~~~
ashu
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux>

"Flux is usually the integral of a vector quantity over a finite surface."

So, I don't think the author is clueless. The vector quantity in this case is
the electric field.

 _Edit:_ although, from reading a little bit more about the Memristor, it
appears that it actually relates the _magnetic_ flux to the charge.

    
    
      d(phi) = Mdq
    

So, maybe the author is indeed clueless.

~~~
hugh
Reply to the edit: I'm reading through the paper now, and the magnetic
properties appear to be irrelevant. The "flux" being discussed is related to
the flow of current.

I'll post something more detailed when I finish the paper.

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soundsop
The original paper by Chua: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/2753819/MemristorThe-
Missing-Circu...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/2753819/MemristorThe-Missing-
Circuit-Element)

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nazgulnarsil
I don't know enough about electronics to know how sensationalist this article
is being.

does it really have all the implications that are mentioned in the article?
(analog computing, AI)

~~~
phaedrus
It's on the same level as the invention of the transistor.

~~~
TrevorJ
I'd say it's at least that big.

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danohuiginn
Woah. Positive correlation between how excited people are by a piece of
science news and how much they know about the topic. How often does that
happen?

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dhs
For the record: It just occured to me that, with memristors, we would be able
to implement large parts of the computational characters of the future
directly in hardware. Which would really be swell.

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Alex3917
I wonder how many bits will ultimately fit in a single memristor. It seems
like this has the ability to increase storage capacity by several orders of
magnitude.

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rms
Are there opportunities for startups designing memristor based circuits?

Are there any patents on memristors?

~~~
newt0311
the paper was published in the 1970s but the device itself has been fabricate
in Hp labs so there is a _very_ good chance that they got a provisional patent
on this. They are probably working on a full patent at this time.

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TrevorJ
This will be big someday, but I fear that the huge inertia that is the
software and hardware industry (well, at least the larger companies) will keep
this out of mainstream for 5-8 years.

~~~
Hexstream
Mommy, I can't wait 5-8 years for this utterly game changing technology... I
want it NOW! I want it nowWwWWwwWw!!!

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Jesin
Whee! Yet another Wave of the Future!

Hmm. Quantum computers or memresistor-based computers. What to choose? Maybe
both, if someone can figure out a way to convert reliably between spin
superpositions and resistance.

WTF is all of this going to do to teh intarwobs?

