Memristor . . . what?

[DJPhil]

I'd never heard of a memristor before, and I stumbled on . The speaker is R. Stanley Williams from HP Labs.

It's a bit long at 47min or so, but if you've got the time it seems like a really good intro to the topic. I wonder if this will turn out to be the sort of thing our grandchildren wonder how we lived without.

[safarir]

Lot of information for my young brain but very interresting

[Kiriakos-GR]

I am a practical man by nature     Still I did read the Wiki explanation , and watch the 25% of the video.

The Memristor theory could possibly improve the accuracy of the fresh designed electronic devices,
by adding more factors in the calculation, of the actual values of parts that are going to be used.

The need about such accuracy, was not important so far to us ..  because we use in our electronics, large in size components , with large tolerances.

The development of lithography , with the help of  Carl Zeiss and their optics,
had move so fast ,  that now anything can be build , in a very small size.

By my understanding, in a such microscopic environment, every little factor looks important.

And , every theory related in to such perfection, it will create more advanced electronic devices.

And because all ready , all this progress that we have so far , does not help the people ,
but only SONY about making playstations ,  and the Army about making smart bombs - air plains with out pilots, and generally , we have loose the true goals as human race , about the proper use of our technology.
So I prefer to go for a Pizza and a beer , and burn some gas as long we have some of it, and spent my energy in more humanly friendly activities.        

[Simon]

gee whats the matter with you tonight ? 

Sounds like an incredible advancement in low power and high speed devices, the sort of thing that will put the average desktop pc into a single chip, incredible

[Kiriakos-GR]

gee whats the matter with you tonight ?  

Sounds like an incredible advancement in low power and high speed devices, the sort of thing that will put the average desktop pc into a single chip, incredible

Well recently I have start acting as a real Greek, and started to philosophize things..  

I have upgrade eleven times my CPU , and still do the same things with my computer.
I have two powerful desktops one strong laptop , one strong PDA , and one fast 3G mobile phone.
And every time that I am trying to use them , there is in front of me web pages giving directions of how to spent my money paying for extra services and parts , that i do not need.

Since the time that technology become the most important merchandise , I think that we lost the game.
I believe that its Not the most valuable thing than all .

Anyway I do not expect from any one to agree with me , I just follow the forum legacy ...

No script ... no fear  .. all opinion ..      

[allanw]

The talk's quite good, especially the last 20 minutes where he talks about possible applications.

[Simon]

Well recently I have start acting as a real Greek, and started to philosophize things..  

I have upgrade eleven times my CPU , and still do the same things with my computer.
I have two powerful desktops one strong laptop , one strong PDA , and one fast 3G mobile phone.
And every time that I am trying to use them , there is in front of me web pages giving directions of how to spent my money paying for extra services and parts , that i do not need.

Since the time that technology become the most important merchandise , I think that we lost the game.
I believe that its Not the most valuable thing than all .

Anyway I do not expect from any one to agree with me , I just follow the forum legacy ...

No script ... no fear  .. all opinion ..      

Well I see your point but I'm not one that upgrades for the sake of, I have a 2.4 GHz quad processor and have no more need to upgrade but for the fun of it. I think this new technology will not be around for another 10 years and from what the guy says will mean that programing will also have to change as its a slightly different approach

[hans]

I wrote a little article about memristors a few years back (in Dutch, sorry guys). I believe HP claimed they were able to make a memresistor on a tiny scale with somekind of aluminium of titanium material. The problem with those things are that they need to be very small, otherwise they don't work. Ohm's law starts to 'fail' at atomic levels. It was really tiny, like a few atoms wide. The theory of this component has been around for ages, but it's in heavy development.

They said they want to use this for computer memory. The first thing is that they can be loaded/unloaded very quickly with little power. Furthermore they 'remember' their state if you turn off the power, because basically if you pass current through one side, it will raise the resistance, do it the other way it will decrease. Then it's just a matter of measuring the resistance of each 'cell' to make a memory. Also because they are so small, they could put a few TB theoretically  in just a couple of square cm..

[Simon]

it sounds like a promissing technology and memory particularly hard disks are always a bottle neck in any system, for example I have a 3 disk raid0 array and 8 GB of ram and a quad processor because processing panoramic montages does require high capacity and speed at the same time so even the average user can have a need for high performance, like I say I'm fairly happy with what I have but faster hard disks would be great apart from a capacity increase. the reduced power consumption is a bonus too

[Polossatik]

Nice to see they still work on that stuff, an electronics professor of mine years ago was a big supporter of that concept.

thankx for the youtube , already know what to look during my lunch break

[Simon]

I agree that there are greater things to life than technology for the sake of it, in fact prefer to go out with my friends than chat online. however we live in a technological society and for the right uses it is a neccesity, my goal was to easily process panoramic images and my computer (4X2.4 GHz, 8 GB ram and 130 MB/s HDD) can now do that fairly easily while I do other stuff, infact it processes one panoramic montage almost as fast as I get the next one setup (200 MB output image) so I'm pretty much happy as i am although a faster HDD and CPU are nice I can cope without complaints.

[tecman]

Latest news:  From EETimes:

http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=5H11FGM1UK5BLQE1GHPCKHWATMY32JVN?articleID=224202453

Seems to be the device DeJour

paul

[Kiriakos-GR]

Erase the memristor from the map, now we have the Nanodots.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanodot

http://www.itwire.com/science-news/biology/8835-nanodots-may-drastically-increase-digital-data-storage-capacity

[Polossatik]

Assuming that memristor stuff can be actually pulled of then IMHO this is a far more fetching "thing" then any tech to simply store data in denser way.

By the way, I found http://www.memristor.org/ , there is (of course...) even a "portal" for this