Home
Memristor

New Flash based products coming to a server near you

Subject: General Tech | April 4, 2013 - 01:40 PM |
Tagged: memristor, non-volitle RAM, mlc, PCIe SSD, hitachi, hp, dell

The Register assembled a brief look at the near future of flash storage products from HP, Hitachi, Dell and NetApp.  HP expects to be shipping memristor based storage devices by the end of the year as well as photonic inter-node backplanes which will offer much faster transfer than copper based solutions.  Hitachi Data Systems believes they have made a breakthrough in MLC flash and controller technology which will not only extend the usable life of the memory but they expect price parity with high end SAS HDDs by the end of 2015.  Check out those stories as well as Dell's server plans and NetApp's new OS right here.

rcjMemristor.jpg

"In every minute;

  • More than 600 videos are uploaded to YouTube
  • More than 13,000 hours of music are streamed via Pandora
  • 168 million emails are transmitted
  • 695,000 status updates are added to Facebook
  • 695,000 Google searches are also made."

Here is some more Tech News from around the web:

Tech Talk

Source: The Register

Is there a Flash flood coming?

Subject: General Tech | March 25, 2013 - 12:50 PM |
Tagged: spintronics, racetrack, pram, molybdenum, micron, memristor, IBM, hp, graphene, flash

Over the past several years we have seen actual production of phase change memory from Micron, though no benchmarks yet, transistors whose resistance can be altered to be used as non-volatile storage which HP has dubbed Memristors and IBM's Spintronic Racetrack Memory; all of which claim to be the replacement for NAND.  There is no question we need a new type of flash, preferably non-volatile, as it is likely that there will be a limit on effective speed and density reached with traditional NAND.  It is also true that the path to our current flash technology is littered with the carcasses of failed technology standards, whether RAMBUS is willing to admit it or not. 

Now there is more details available on yet another possible contender based on molybdenum disulfide which sports a charge-trapping layer to make it non-volatile.  The Register was told that by layering MoS2 between layers of graphene they get a NAND cell smaller than traditional cells but unfortunately there was no report of the speed of these cells.  We may soon be living in interesting times, with process shrunk traditional flash and these four technologies competing for market share.  You can bet that they will not be compatible and that each will likely spawn their own breeds of controllers and make purchasing SSDs and other flash storage devices much more complicated, at least until one standard can claim victory over the others.

elreg_mos2_graphene_nvm_cell.jpg

"A Swiss government research lab has reinvented flash memory using graphene and molybdenite in a way that should be faster, scale smaller, use less energy and yet more flexible than boring old NAND.

Molybdenite is MoS2, molybdenum disulfide, which is similar to graphite and also has a lubricating effect. Atomically it is a layer of molybdenum atoms between top and bottom layers of sulfide atoms. It is a semiconductor and can be used to create transistor."

Here is some more Tech News from around the web:

Tech Talk

Source: The Register

Reasonably priced memristors may be coming soon thanks to a botched LED experiment

Subject: General Tech | May 23, 2012 - 01:29 PM |
Tagged: hp, memristor

Over two years ago we heard about a project at HP to design a memristor, a possible future replacement for non-volatile flash memory.  The actual resistance of a memristor component can be changed, allowing it to be used as an effective storage medium due to the incredibly short time that it takes for the medium to be written to or read.  That speed was measured in picoseconds when last we heard about advances with this storage medium, just before Christmas.  One of the main hurdles that HP has been facing with adoption of the memristor was the price, but thanks to a failed experiment designing silicon oxide LEDs that may no longer be a problem.  The Register reports on the experiment which seemed to have developed unstable LEDs but when one of the designers investigated the problem further he realized the film they had created predicatably flipped between conductive and non-conductive states as power was applied.  HP's memristors may be arriving sooner than we had thought.

ucl_reram-device.jpg

"The HP-popularised memristor device is a form of ReRAM – resistive RAM – and is fairly expensive to make. Metal oxide-based ReRAM technology promises to combine minimum memory speed with NAND non-volatility and be able to provide higher capacities than NAND, which is thought will cease to be usable as process geometries go down past 10nm. ReRAM dies will need less electricity to run and will take up less space than equivalent capacity NAND."

Here is some more Tech News from around the web:

Tech Talk

Source: The Register

More memristor magic

Subject: General Tech | November 22, 2011 - 01:31 PM |
Tagged: memristor, hp

One of the new technologies we have been keeping an eye on is the memristor, a transistor whose resistance can be altered and used as a storage medium.  The development of this new technology has been headed by HP and they have some new results to announce, which you can catch at Nanotechweb.  We have already seen a recent game changer, with SSDs based on non-volatile flash memory bringing never before seen data access speeds to the desktop.  Memristors could be the next step, bringing storage access speeds measured in picoseconds not nanoseconds and usable lifetimes of a trillion cycles as opposed to flash which is at best measured in hundreds of thousands.  They may also make volatile flash obsolete as the speeds are faster than current DRAM and SRAM, or perhaps see memory and storage unite into one unit.

NTW_memristor.jpg

"Memristors are promising candidates for future high-density nonvolatile memories given their demonstrated desirable properties such as endurance on the order of 1 trillion cycles, electroforming-free operation, compatibility with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) processes, and the ability to be integrated in high-density cross-bar arrays. Other envisioned applications include digital logic, synaptic and hybrid circuits. For many of these applications evaluating the high-speed dynamical properties of memristors, including the switching speed, is paramount."

Here is some more Tech News from around the web:

Tech Talk

 

Source: Nanotechweb

HP discusses "Memristors", doesn't discuss better name

Subject: General Tech, Storage | May 17, 2011 - 12:39 PM |
Tagged: memristor, hp

Not satisfied with resistors, capacitors, and inductors: scientists at HP are working on a new electrical element known as the memristor. A memristor functions as a resistor with the ability to change in resistance variable to the current placed on the element. What makes a memristor desirable for a company like HP is that the alterable resistence of the element can be used to store and more recently process data.

17-Memristor.png
Comes preloaded with Phantom of the Opera Browser.
Photo credits: R. Stanley Williams, HP Senior Fellow and Director of Information & Quantum Systems Lab; Michael J. Miller, PCMag
 
Memristors are noteworthy due to some intriguingly advantageous properties:
  • Switchable between on and off in a nanosecond
  • Capability to store up to 4 bits per ‘device’
  • Can process data on the device itself
  • Quite easy to manufacture for current chip factories 
Also noted is the statement that the multi-level nature of the memristor functions similar to how a human synapse functions. There are no shortages of technologies that claim to emulate human thought so my strong instinct is that this technology brings us no closer than any other technology. Regardless of whether this technology furthers AI development or whether it is hype; if the prospect of ridiculous speed and highly dense non-volatile storage pans true I have just two words: do want.
Source: PCMag

PC Perspective
Upcoming Events
  • 5/23 @ 6:00pm PDT / 9:00pm EDT
    This Week in Computer Hardware
  • 5/29 @ 7:00pm PDT / 10:00pm EDT
    PC Perspective Podcast