Inside the memristor

If we assume, and hope, that the memristor is here to stay just what could it mean for future of the technology we know and love?

Williams suggests we haven’t even scraped the surface of what’s possible. Aside from nanoscale devices using very little power – key to a mobile revolution (and we honestly haven’t touched the tip of what mobile computing is really about yet) – low-power, high-performance, non-volatile memory appears to be the immediate focus.

While not tested, it’s expected memristors will perform at about 1/10th the speed of current DDR memory. Granted, this may not be as fast as your beloved Corsair or Patriot sticks, but consider this – with memristors your machine could truly be ‘instant-on’, reviving in exactly the state you left it in. This may sound like ‘hibernation’ under Windows and Linux, but hibernation uses a swapfile to store memory state information that’s loaded back from disk into RAM when you ‘wake’ the machine up. With memristors, you don’t need no stinkin’ hard drives – your memory can keep its state when you switch the machine off.

That’s fricken hot.

Indeed – if we can dream of cheap manufacturing costs – memristors could signal the death of the the hard drive altogether. Remember, a hard drive is simply non-volatile storage for your data, and your RAM is the ‘working set’ of data you need at the time, loaded in from said hard drive. With memristors, they can become one and the same.

And that’s even hotter.

Chua postulates other possibilities. One of the problems that plague current electrical engineering is that the more transistors packed into higher and higher densities, the higher the power and generated heat, making it harder to produce high-performance, low heat output devices. Memristors, it is thought, will be able to solve problems with scaling here. Think mobile phones, portable gadgets like iPods, and even laptops using less power than they do now, extending battery life, and without sacrificing performance. “Memristors will enable very small nanoscale devices to be made without generating all the excess heat that scaling down transistors is causing today.”



A more esoteric possibility is the creation of ‘human-brain’ like characteristics, with memristors being used to remember and associate patterns, and learn from experience, the way that people do. Williams believes the very nature of memristors is similar to the way neurons work in the brain, and could thus be the building blocks of neural nets.

This is just theorising what’s possible based on this very early implementation of the memristor, but perhaps Chua and Williams are right and this is a revolution. And if it is, how incredible to think we are still discovering these innate facets of our universe – and that we’re also here to experience them.