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 »

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 »

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.

Much of the recent interest in HP’s finding the “missing” memristor has been based on the presumption that it is correctly interpreted as the “4^th fundamental circuit element” after the resistor, capacitor, and inductor. The original argument from Leon Chua was that there were four ways to link the variables of charge and current to the variables of flux-linkage and voltage. The resistor, capacitor, and inductor represent three ways to link these variables while the memristor was postulated as representing the “missing” link connecting charge and flux-linkage. This may seem like a reasonable argument at first glance but it is not without flaws. Read the rest of this entry »

Leo Chua gave one of his brilliant talks on May 21, 2010 at the ICCNS 2010 conference at the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems. Just to be sure you get the magnitude of the event: Leon Chua is the first to theorize the existence of memristors with his paper “Memristor: The Missing Circuit Element” on IEEE TRANSACTIONS on Circuit Theory, published in September 1971. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the main motivation of the Neurdon blog is to shed light on the true innovative force behind the introduction of new computing paradigms based on the nervous system functioning. This is why when neurdons read the word cat associated with large-scale simulations, we get a little sad… readers should know that the greatest revolution that will see AI and the semiconductor industry jointly turn upside down our current use of intelligent machines has nothing to do with a bunch of cats. Though, according to PHYSORG article “Cat brain: A step toward the electronic equivalent”, the pinnacle of memristor-based computer evolution will be a cat. IBM’s “Max” (no, not Max Versace… apparently my shortened name is widely used to name unaware felines across the globe…) will be in good company. 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.

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 »

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 »

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.