The 2nd Memristor and Memristive Systems Symposium took place on Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at Sutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeley. The 2010 symposium covered memristor technology updates, new device technologies (materials and fabrication), device models for CAD, novel circuits using memristors, and systems architecture harnessing memristor and memristive device properties. Read the rest of this entry »

Brain-computer interfacing is an area of research that is currently in flux as researchers try to understand not only what but who BCIs will work best for. One study by a group of researchers at Bremen University, Germany has recently attempted to determine who, exactly, is the key demographic for BCI use. More specifically, they looked at a group of subjects using a certain flavor of EEG-based BCI called steady state visually evoked potential (SSVEP), a technique where visual stimuli are flashed on a screen at certain frequencies. These flashes have very nice EEG signals for increasing classification accuracy during a certain visual task. Read the rest of this entry »

Patrick Cox is the author of a very interesting article on Contrarianprofits.com. In the post, Cox makes the case that the time is ripe for large-scale adoption of robotics in both civilian and military applications.The latter is old news: in previous posts, we looked at the growing opportunities, and concerns, of robotic applications in dangerous (or dangerously boring) domains. Read the rest of this entry »

In About SyNAPSE I characterized neuromorphic devices as the opposite of conventional Von Neumann processors. This is somewhat of a oversimplification, however. Modern processors are actually quite evolved from pure Von Neumann devices. They are dramatically more capable on virtually every computational workload than their heritage would suggest is possible. For neuromorphic devices to find any success in the marketplace, they’ll need to offer a significant performance gain against existing solutions, but with comparable or lesser power consumption and cost.

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Top Gun taught us that the best and brightest pilots can perform some amazing aerobatics.  Nobody seems surprised that a good pilot, with some practice, can move seamlessly from the flight maneuvers used on a Boeing 747 to those featured in Blue Angels shows.  While computer autopilots have performed well in commercial aircraft for some time, however, getting an electronic computer to pull a plane successfully through an aerobatic maneuver is almost impossible, and is thus a relatively new field of research. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the major themes in the SyNAPSE project is developing chips that can learn meaningful information, and preserve it over time. In other words: memristors can learn, but we need to ensure that they are stably learning something useful for the system they are embedded in.

Some help to solve this technological problem comes from neuroscience. The question of how can the cerebral cortex develop stable memories while at the same time incorporating new information through an organism lifetime has been a central theme in many research groups. The talk posted on Neurdon describes one of these approaches. Read the rest of this entry »

Replicators in Europe

In the 7th Framework Program of the European Community a project has started in 2008, in which modular robots are developed by many research parties in Europe (Universität Stuttgart, Universität Graz, Universität Karlsruhe, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Sheffield Hallam University, Fraunhofer Gesellshaft, Institut Mikroelektronickych Aplikaci, Ubisense, Ceske Vysoke Uceni Technicke v Praze and Almende B.V., see http://www.replicators.eu) that go beyond the swarm mode and are able to form robot organisms.  Read the rest of this entry »

I came across a series of videos on Youtube of the 2008 UC Berkeley Synposium on memristors. As many of you know by now, Leon Chua published a seminal paper in 1971 on the missing basic circuit element, and in 1976, along with Sung-Mo Kang, he published another paper describing a large class of devices and systems they called memristive devices. Read the rest of this entry »

Marvin Minsky has decided to resuscitate AI from the 80’s ashes with a fresh $5M grant to support an MIT team in a “project to build intelligent machines”. More info here. I have strong doubts on Minsky’s approach, and the new Turing test: “can the computer read, understand, and explain a children’s book”. I would be satisfied with replicating the children…

Memristors is not a solo business. In a recent SyNAPSE-centric meeting, Robert Thijs Kozma brought up a very interesting post on the rapidly changing business landscape of memristors. A number of companies beyond Hewlett Packard, including AMD, Axon Technologies, Energy Conversion Devices, Micron Technologies, Samsung, and Sharp have been very active in researching, and patenting, memristor-based devices. An excellent outlook of the business and patent landscape around variations on the memristor theme can be found here.