The HP Memristor Debate 62
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by
Soulskill
from the what's-in-a-name dept.
from the what's-in-a-name dept.
New submitter AaronLS writes "There has been a debate about whether HP has or has not developed a memristor. Since it's something fairly different from existing technologies, and similar in many ways to a memristor, I think they felt comfortable using the term. However, the company has been criticized for using that labeling by former U.S. patent officer Blaise Moutett. On the other hand, had HP created a new, unique label, they would have probably gotten flack for pretending it's something new when it's not. Will anything positive come from this debate? Electrical engineering analyst Martin Reynolds sums it up nicely: 'Is Stan Williams being sloppy by calling it a "memristor"? Yeah, he is. Is Blaise Moutett being pedantic in saying it is not a "memristor"? Yeah, he is. [...] At the end of day, it doesn't matter how it works as long as it gives us the ability to build devices with really high density storage.'"
Re:Lousy summary (Score:2, Interesting)
try NASA.
The pot is black and has conflict of interest (Score:5, Interesting)
Former U.S. patent officer calls someone unethical. The mind boggles.
And as if that weren't enough, he has patents in the area himself and therefore cannot be a fair witness.
Skepticism about radical new devices is always healthy, but Mouttet's opinion on this topic inspires the opposite of confidence.
Re:What gives? As long as it's close enough... (Score:5, Interesting)
The issue here isn't the imperfection of the HP device. It is a matter of semantics.
The 'memristor' was conceived as a term to describe a basic device where the change in flux is related to the change in charge.
What HP have produced is a device that substantially behaves like a memristor, if you are only measuring current and voltage at the terminals. That's useful if you want to build a memory device, since the behaviour is such that resistance will vary with the integral of the current through it.
However, the physics by which the HP device works is not a physics of memristance. For practical purposes, that may not matter; it is a simple device with useful properties. But terminology wise, it is memristance behaviour, not an unqualified memristor.
Equivalently, one can build an active circuit that uses a capacitor and a feedback loop to emulate an inductor. It isn't technically an inductor at all, but it does get called an "active inductor".
Re:Memristors (Score:5, Interesting)