Earlier this year, HP revealed that it has designed an electrical resistor with memory properties called "memristor," a technology that is simpler than existing transistors, and does not require a constant electrical current to retain information.
The memristor technology can store and retrieve values outside the standard 1's and 0's, which opens up many new possibilities outside of traditional computing – such as artificial intelligence. That will take some time, but the base technology is ready.
HP announced this week a joint development agreement with Hynix Semiconductor to bring the memristor to market in future memory products.
The two companies will jointly develop new materials and process integration technology to transfer the memristor technology from research to commercial development in the form of Resistive Random Access Memory (ReRAM). Hynix will implement the memristor technology in its research and development fab.
ReRAM is non-volatile memory with low power consumption that holds the potential to replace Flash memory currently used in mobile phones and MP3 players. It also has the potential to serve as a universal storage medium – that is, memory that can behave as Flash, DRAM or even a hard drive.
Memristors require less energy to operate, are faster than present solid-state storage technologies and can retain information even when power is off. The memristor also can perform logic, showing that memristor-based devices could change the standard paradigm of computing by enabling computation to one day be performed in chips where data is stored, rather than on a specialized central processing unit.
Read more about memristors here and check out the video below.
