There has been a recent breakthrough in organic memristors, indicating that we may see the adoption of this technology in the not too distant future. The problems with previously developed memristors were that they were too slow to change states and unable to hold the memory of that state for long enough to be useful. This new type of memristor can switch states in 30ns or less, comparable to traditional resistors and it is capable of holding that state for over 11.5 days without any power. This memristor is also quite stable, with an expected lifetime of 10^12 cycles. One of the driving forces behind the development of a memristor which can perform as well as a traditional resistor is cost, memristors are much less expensive to make and do not require rare metals in their manufacture.
Pop over to Nanotechweb to read more about the research conducted by Thirumalai Venky Venkatesan of the National University of Singapore, Sreebrata Goswami of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Sciences and Victor Batista of Yale University.
"Researchers in Singapore, the US and India have now made a new organic memristor based on ruthenium complexed with azo-aromatic ligands that is better than any such memory device made to date."
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Just some
Just some clarification…
For memristors, the point of comparison isn’t resistors, but more like transistors or non-volatile storage such as flash or EEPROM. Resistors do not “switch states” like memristors or transistors do. And modern transistor switching speed is in the 10 to 100 ps range, much much faster than the quoted 30 ns.
On the other hand, flash erase times are in the ms range, so 30 na is very fast compared to that.
You find a sexy picture of
You find a sexy picture of memristors then! Only ones I could find were from different research projects. In the article they state "a rise time of less than 30ns (as measured with the limits of today’s instruments)", implying this is a measurement limitation and that they know it is less than 30ns.
Haha, not so much the picture
Haha, not so much the picture I was critiquing as the written comparisons to resistors.
Re. the rise time measurements: 30 ns roughly corresponds to 12MHz of signal bandwidth [1], which is in no way close to the limits of current instruments. Even the cheapest scopes on the market can handle 20 MHz BW [2].
I almost feel like that has to be a typo and they meant ps (picoseconds), not ns. If it were ps, then signal BW would be around 12 GHz, and measuring that is much, much more challenging. Prices for instruments in that range start at 6 figures [3], and go up to the “if you have to ask…” level [4].
[1] https://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/bogatin-s-rules-of-thumb/4424573/Rule-of-Thumb–1–The-bandwidth-of-a-signal-from-its-rise-time
[2] https://m.aliexpress.com/s/item/32807818787.html?spm=a2g0n.search-cache.0.0.11145abks7fup#autostay
[3] http://www.keysight.com/en/pdx-x201719-pn-DSO91204A/infiniium-high-performance-oscilloscope-12-ghz?cc=US&lc=eng
[4]
https://www.tek.com/oscilloscope/dpo70000sx. <-- rumored price $315,000
Fair point, should replace
Fair point, should replace resistor with transistor. It am still not sure about the rise time, as the Nature article also states nanoseconds. One would suspect that this indicates that it is much faster than other experimental memristors, only an order of magnitude off, but I do not know that for sure.
Fair point, should replace
Fair point, should replace resistor with transistor. It am still not sure about the rise time, as the Nature article also states nanoseconds. One would suspect that this indicates that it is much faster than other experimental memristors, only an order of magnitude off, but I do not know that for sure.