HP Reports Memory Resistor Breakthrough 141
andy1307 writes "Hewlett-Packard scientists on Thursday will report advances demonstrating significant progress in the design of memristors, or memory resistors. 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 vast three-dimensional array of memristors. The scheme could potentially free designers to stack thousands of switches on top of one another in a high-rise fashion, permitting a new class of ultra-dense computing devices even after two-dimensional scaling reaches fundamental limits."
Research (Score:2)
Smaller is good (Score:1)
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Well, they'll probably abstract it into the current one-dimensional addressing scheme for memory. But these things aren't used just for memory - you can build logic with them. Instead of 400,000 x 400,000 = (1,600,000,000 or 1.6 billion) transistors, 1,000,000 x 1,000,000 x 10,000 = (10,000,000,000,000,000 or 10 quadrillion) transistors in one package. Some for memory, some for logic, some for special purposes. You know, skynet. It gives us another 24 years of Moore's Law - though it probably won't take
Research! YES! (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally something that sounds like it's actually patentable.
And not just patentable, but good solid research. It seems to me that lately, US companies have been cutting and cutting R&D budgets. The markets are so focused on who makes their current quarter earnings marks, and sinking money into innovation does not help towards making that profits goal. And because of this, it seems that we have lost touch with planning for the future.
That always made me sick to my stomach. I am always thrilled when these big companies, that spun up and put technology where it is today, the HPs, the IBMs, the Xeroxs, the ATT/Bell/Lucents, etc., come out with something cool. I even like it when the small guys do something, but often they dont have the money to make it all the way to market.
Anyway, my point is, I hope we see corporations (and everyone else, like NASA, etc) realize how important science and innovation are to our future. I hope that we can get back to the "old days" of (literally) shooting for the moon and achieving it, rather than spending money on fluffy marketing and trying to squeeze out margins with just barely passable work.
This kinda stuff, I love. More please!
(sorry for a horribly written post)
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Why'd you post this anonymously? It was worth putting your (user)name on.
Why would anyone write something that they didn't feel comfortable putting their (user)name on? To me, that's probably a sign that you shouldn't be writing it*...
* whistleblowing and revolts against government excluded.
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Why would anyone write something that they didn't feel comfortable putting their (user)name on? To me, that's probably a sign that you shouldn't be writing it*...
Because your real name is "thePowerOfGrayskull", right? Either way, why do you need to know the identity of a poster? Isn't the important thing the quality of their argument not their identity?
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Why would anyone write something that they didn't feel comfortable putting their (user)name on? To me, that's probably a sign that you shouldn't be writing it*...
Because your real name is "thePowerOfGrayskull", right? Either way, why do you need to know the identity of a poster? Isn't the important thing the quality of their argument not their identity?
Actually, my real name is "Marc Paradise" which is pretty easy to deduce since my web site and sig both point to "marcparadise.com" ;)
That aside, you raise a good point and I agree. But in context of what I was replying to, OP said that the GP's post was "worthy" of using his registered name for. My reply to that is that if you're posting anything you feel you *must* hide or distance yourself from, perhaps there's a reason you feel that way and you should think twice before posting it at all.
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First - my real name is "Marc Paradise", which isn't exactly a secret considering that my sig and web site both link to "marcparadise.com".
That aside, I agree with you. But in context of the conversation, I was trying to say that if you're making a post that you feel you *must* distance yourself from, then perhaps you should look at why that is
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maybe 'a isn't a regular
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Finally something that sounds like it's actually patentable.
Yeah, but it can't be that big of a breakthrough... Nobody's filed any lawsuits yet.
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The devices, known as memristors, or memory resistors, were conceived in 1971 by Leon O. Chua, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, but they were not put into effect until 2008 at the H.P. lab here.
Except the idea isn't new, it's just the first time they can actually make one and test it.
Regardless of that, this sounds very interesting. They are non-volatile, they are 1/th the size of a transistor, and they use far less power. Also (I assume), they should be cheaper to make. They also said that they tested them with hundreds of thousands of rw operations. That is pretty amazing at such an early stage of development.
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if they can handle more RW then a SSD, without wear leveling, without breaking, it would be very interesting indeed.
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since the memristor is a new fundamental componant of electronics, one would have to assume it has teh same durability as a transistor, resistor, etc.
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maybe so, tho the first design description talked about moving oxygen atoms around, or something like that...
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I'll claim prior art
And how will you do that, if you can't speak, Mr. Anderson?
Sincerely,
HP Legal Department
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In writing, of course. It's the better choice for anything with legal implications anyway.
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You can claim that on anything these days can't you.
My memory... (Score:5, Funny)
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Has been resisting me for years. I'll be damned if I can remember where I put my keys.
Have you tried turning your brain off and back on again?
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You forgot...that memristors are non-volatile.
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Yes, of course. I watch TV all the time.
Re:My memory... (Score:5, Funny)
They are right under your fingers... you used them to type in your message, remember?
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They are right under your fingers... you used them to type in your message, remember?
How do you know? He might have used a touch screen interface with virtual keyboard, or even handwriting recognition.
Re:My memory... (Score:5, Funny)
You could have used Google [fun-images.com].
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Heat? (Score:4, Insightful)
But is it so much more efficient that you could stack thousands of layers without turning your chip into a hunk of molten glass? That would probably be an even bigger breakthrough.
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It's more than that. This could have huge implications for no-power flash storage, and it has lower power requirements than the phase-change memory that is currently the top dog. I'm also curious about the 'data processing' blurb in TFA:
"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."
"He said the company could have a competit
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Maximum thickness (Score:2)
If we're now stacking in 3d, why are we still using square (instead of cubic) measurements?
USB flash drives, SDHC cards, and especially microSDHC cards still have a maximum thickness. "Gigabytes per square inch" would refer to the typical thickness of a packaged memory device.
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From my reading, I don't think the added layers are going to add significant thickness. I'm picturing more like PCB boards - dozens of layers, not thousands. Each layer is still thin enough that the base substrate is still thicker than the rest of the layers, combined.
Still, even 10 layers would raise density by an order of magnitude, so it's not shabby. I'd think you'd have cost concerns if you're trying for hundreds, much less thousands of layers. Each layer would be another set of manufacturing steps
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Its = possessive.
It's = "it is"
Learn fuckin' English.
Protip: That last sentence was a correct use of an apostrophe.
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Re:Heat? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. Memristors don't require that power be applied in order to retain memory state. Heat might limit write and retrieval rate, but it wouldn't limit the number of layers. I suspect that it might make heat pipes built into the memory boards to be a highly desirable option, but that would be to enable faster access, not to allow a greater number of layers.
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I suspect that it might make heat pipes built into the memory boards to be a highly desirable option, (..)
Hardly - the maximum amount of heat loss would be limited by the application.
If you'd use this technology to build a SSD for a laptop or a portable media player, there are some hard upper limits on how much power (=heat) that SSD could draw. Things like battery life, the amount of heat a full system can deal with, acceptable noise levels for cooling fans, etc. If bandwidth = heat, the application would limit the maximum available bandwidth for a given power consumption.
With that constraint as a given, I
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Yes. Memristors don't require that power be applied in order to retain memory state. Heat might limit write and retrieval rate, but it wouldn't limit the number of layers. I suspect that it might make heat pipes built into the memory boards to be a highly desirable option, but that would be to enable faster access, not to allow a greater number of layers.
No reason we can't use the peltier effect to move the heat to the surface and sap it away with heat sinks like we do now.
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No reason we can't use the peltier effect to move the heat to the surface and sap it away with heat sinks like we do now.
Please share with us your method of inserting peltier cooler layers between silicon layers. We're talking about removing heat from the middle of a three-dimensional structure, not a flat plane.
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Please share with us your method of inserting peltier cooler layers between silicon layers. We're talking about removing heat from the middle of a three-dimensional structure, not a flat plane.
Buildings have floors. They don't all have the same stuff in them.
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Please share with us your method of inserting peltier cooler layers between silicon layers. We're talking about removing heat from the middle of a three-dimensional structure, not a flat plane.
Buildings have floors. They don't all have the same stuff in them.
Your plan is to put the peltier cooler on another floor? I don't see how that will help.
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Your plan is to put the peltier cooler on another floor? I don't see how that will help.
Silicon wafers have layers. So do buildings. Put the cooling in between the active circuits. Heat moves upward. Use a tree-like structure to channel heat.
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I had hoped I wouldn't have to spell it out, but the primary appeal of the memristor is the ability to layer circuit on circuit without anything in between, requiring no interconnects. Your plan eliminates this benefit.
There is a possibility though; MEMS-built heat pipes built into the chip. I seem to recall hearing that someone was researching this but I forget who, or if it was even true.
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I had hoped I wouldn't have to spell it out, but the primary appeal of the memristor is the ability to layer circuit on circuit without anything in between, requiring no interconnects. Your plan eliminates this benefit.
The primary benefit is the meristors isn't size, it's that they don't decay after a certain number of rewrites. They are durable solid-state components. The benefit isn't eliminated -- the layers can still be stacked. I'm just saying that you can use the peltier effect, possibly by aligning the meristors themselves in a lattice structure, to channel heat towards the conduits. In any semiconductor, there is a 'hot' and a 'cold' side, as it were. By aligning them all in a similar fashion, you can channel and
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Wrap the peltier cooler around a copper sheet. The composite is inserted between the layers. The heat is highly concentrated in the copper, which is topped with a heatsink.
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Should you still call it a chip?
Would cube be better?
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Chip, we called floppies floppies long after they had ceased to be floppy.
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More to the point, we still produce core dumps, although the times when there was core memory to dump are long gone.
And of course, solid state disks usually are not disk shaped.
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We still produce core dumps? are you crazy? Blasphemous! My applications never core dump, ever! (Yeah, Friday is the official release date of v 1.5 of one of the apps I develop. There'll be a big presentation, lots of people, and I'm freaking nervous). I mean, I'm not nervous! My applications are bug free. (crawls back into the corner, continues countdown to Friday 10 A.M while swinging back and forth).
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Block, surely?
And that is the difference... (Score:5, Funny)
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Apple is not big enough to do pure R&D like HP, Microsoft and IBM. they finally have a lot of cash and they might start now, but most of this decade they were like MS in the 90's. copy everyone and come out with a cooler looking versioni
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Ummm...
Apple is very nearly as big as MS these days: http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/04/05/1435246/Microsoft-and-Apple-Rumble-Into-Middle-Age?from=rss [slashdot.org]
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If you look in terms of number of employees, amount of R&D spending, revenues, profit, etc ... MS still dwarfs apple.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/snapshots/114.html [cnn.com]
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/snapshots/879.html [cnn.com]
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Re:And that is the difference... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Apple is a douche firm and should be classified as such
Fixed that for you.
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Don't smear the good name of douches with the likes of Apple!
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Apple is a design firm and should be classified as such
Apple's designs should be put on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'
42.
Leopard is dead; long live Snow Leopard (Score:3, Funny)
Apple's designs should be put on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'
Don't you mean "Beware of the Snow Leopard?" They changed the sign last August.
10.6.
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1. IBM 410,830
2. HP 304,000
3. Microsoft 93,000
4. Oracle 86,000
5. Intel 79,800
6. Cisco 65,550
7. Apple 34,300
8. Google 19,835
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I don't know if this is a real mccoy (slashdot hasn't been the same in these days), but if it is, it's electrical engineering, not computer science.
Kids these days...
Not exactly... (Score:2, Insightful)
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....isn't more along the lines of "Solid State Physics"?
Which is taught in Electrical Engineering. Or at least it was a couple years ago when I got my degree.
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They are distinctly not responsible for capacitive multi-touch displays. They took that from someone else, like all their other "innovations".
I'd love to see this in a cell phone. (Score:2, Interesting)
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THREE dimensions? (Score:5, Funny)
Fuck everything, we are doing 5 dimensions (Score:2)
As if two weren't enough [xkcd.com].
Fuck everything, we are doing 5 dimensions [theonion.com]
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Forget replacing only RAM (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a really big deal. Since our brains work in much the same way as an array of memristors, this brings the possibility of an artificial brain (and perhaps artificial intelligence) much closer to reality.
Maybe I will live to see Data in my lifetime.
This...could...work! (Score:2)
I read about the original research and hadn't heard anything for a while and wondered if HP was still working on this.
Personally, I feel this is OUTSTANDING news. RTFA, they think they'll get 20GB on a square centimeter. And have a viable competitor to flash memory in 3 years.
Instead of "coming on Blu-Ray Tuesday!", it'll be "coming on MR-Chip Tuesday!"
Of course, when they get the 4D version working, that'll change to "coming last week on MR-Chip!"
( And yes, I just copyrighted "MR-Chip"...)
Goodbye, MR-Chip (Score:2)
( And yes, I just copyrighted "MR-Chip"...)
You're too late [imdb.com].
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Just wait until Mark Hurd hears about it..."You mean we still have researchers we haven't outsourced or fired yet? Flunky, get me a stack of pink slips, I'll fix this straight away!"
Joule heating (Score:2)
It seems like Joule heating would be a problem if the memory consists of resistors. In particular, a three-dimensional stack would build up heat fairly quickly. Of course, switching transistors requires a good deal of energy so the prospect of not needing to constantly refresh each element may be a huge advantage in this respect. Also, it depends on the on and off resistances and the currents required to read and write bits.
Does anyone know of a link to a more technical description of the technology?
Finally, the end of hard disk drives? (Score:2)
I think HP's research could pave the way for solid-state disk (SSD) drives in the 3-4 TB storage capacity range about the size of today's 2.5" laptop drives, which will essentially end the reign of hard disk drives with spinning disc platters and moving read-write heads. Imagine being able to boot Windows 7 completely in about 5-6 seconds from the time the "disk" starts its boot sequence, or read-write access at essentially RAM speeds.
Alas, we'll start to run into this problem: current disk drive interfaces
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Why should we use a spec made for spinning disks at all? The logical thing would be to access this as what it is: Memory. After all, you don't use SATA for reading your BIOS either, do you?
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Actually, I think for compatibility reasons when these new solid-state high-capacity drives arrive they'll still be using the Serial ATA-II interface, if only for one reason: compatibility with current hardware.
Sure it may not be as fast as RAM itself, but with no more access speed limits imposed by the speed of the spinning disk and the seek times of read-write heads, we get boot times, data access times and data indexing times that will still be many times faster than Western Digital's VelociRaptor Serial
I didn't know HP did RnD these days (Score:2)
Since spinning off Agilent and Avago. Always thought that those would be the divisions involved with something like this?
Figured since then all HP did was slap far east junk into cases. Does the server/etc portion still do a lot of RnD?
20 gigabytes a square centimeter? (Score:2)
Current microSDHC cards are already 16GB [lexar.com], so 20 GB in a square centimeter in 3 years isn't impressive at all.
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Starts getting impressive when you stack those square cm layers. Something you can't do with conventional flash.
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If it's 20GB per 1cm square layer, they should have said so. They should also have said something like "we will probably be able to start at around 10 layers minimum, giving us 200GB per square centimeter", which is much more impressive.
Yes, but (Score:2)
Froogle Futures (Score:2)
From TFA:
"We believe that [20 GB/cm^2] is at least a factor of two better storage than flash memory will [] have [three years from now]"
I wouldn't be too thrilled with that proposition. This is an ambitious new technology introduction. It won't take much for that time frame to slip by a year or two, in which case your edge is shot and your price structure is unlikely to be competitive.
Suppose you get 5% initial market share where the difference in feature set is "just right" for some set of early adopters. Now with 5% of the revenue base, your business requirement is to scale faster than a mature competitor sitting on 95% of the
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Last time I checked one major reason for you being able to leave that comment on this website is Software.
Or are you telling me you're blowing bits and bytes out of your ass to submit on /.?
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I miss real engineering and science. OH, and by the way, definitely check out the latest south park episode.
. Are you a subtle troll, or did you just "woosh" yourself?
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Should we start worrying that devices based on this tech can start developing psychological issues?
Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he ping Them only intermittently?
Though the HP confusion gets worse when you get reader programs for the blind involved. Some of them autoexpand HP into "horsepower". Model numbers can add yet another layer of weirdness to that particular mistake, since the computer then seems to be talking about a printer with more power than a Formula One race car.
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i guess the sooner we get software that can handle context, not just direct translation, the better...