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.

"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."

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