It was less than 24 hours ago since the last post echoing an article on the NYT on memristors, and two more articles have appeared on both the NYT and CNN with the reports of the announcement, made on Tuesday by HP, that it would commercialize a new computer memory technology with Hynix, the South Korean chip maker. Read the rest of this entry »

It was 1965 when Gordon Moore (co-founder of Intel) made the observation that the number of transistors per square inch of integrated circuits roughly doubled each year, starting from the time of introduction of these devices. What was in 1965 an observation become a law postulating that this trend would not come to a stop. Unfortunately, the limits of physics have caused a recent slowdown in the rhythm at which semiconductor companies can miniaturize transistors. Yesterday, an article on the NYT focused on a fresh announcement by Rice University and HP on a fundamental discovery able to overcome the barrier to the continued miniaturization of electronic components. Read the rest of this entry »

While building mammalian-sized whole brain systems is surely one of the most important research avenues in the new AI wave, with the promise of revolutionize both mobile robotics and more traditional data mining applications, much can be learned from isolating the functional principles encapsulated in small networks of neurons in non-mammalian species. Read the rest of this entry »

Note: This posting summarizes some arguments I presented at the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Circuits and Systems. The complete presentation is available at this link.

In an earlier posting I presented arguments of why the idea of the memristor as a fourth fundamental circuit element is likely to be wrong. However, regardless of whether or not the memristor is considered as a fundamental circuit element, one may ask if it is technically correct to say that the researchers from HPLabs actually did discover a memristor. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times published an article this Monday on I.B.M.’s bid to have their Watson computer system compete in a number of televised Jeopardy! episodes, a move reminiscent of the famous set of chess matches between I.B.M.’s Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov. Reading the entire report may take some time but is definitely worthwhile for anyone who’s never heard a description of the set of problems involved in building such a computer system. Read the rest of this entry »

In the past few years a lot of attention has been directed to “memristors” as a new type of memory cell and as a new component for neuromorphic electronic designs. However, currently most proposed neuromorphic designs do not yet use the 2-terminal memristive devices promoted by Leon Chua and HP but rather use more conventional electronic circuit components such as the floating gate memory cells used in Flash memory. Read the rest of this entry »

According tho this post, HP plans to introduce the first commercial product based on memristor memory in three years. In case you wonder: no, it won’t be a USB brain. According to Technology Review, it will be a flash memory.

Why flash memory? This storage suffer from some of the same limitations that plague silicon transistors: the limited amount of data-writing cycles, and the physical limits that prevent increasing storage in dense memory devices. Memristor memory can withstand up to about a million read-write cycles in lab tests, and can achieve densities unreachable by conventional technologies currently employed to build flash memory devices.

Want to learn more? Check out the original post.

In a recent post in Robotics Online, Jeff Burnstein discusses two possible, and equally likely, scenarios for the development of future robotic platforms: the Honda approach, and the GM approach. 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 »

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 »