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.