WORLD
Memristors in silicon promising for dense, fast memory
Baku, May 21 (AZERTAC). A memristor`s electronic properties make it suitable for both for computing and for far faster, denser memory.
Researchers at the European Materials Research Society meeting now say it can be made much more cheaply, using current semiconductor techniques.
There has been significant interest in memristors since the first prototype was unveiled in 2008, not least because it took 37 years for the device to make it from theoretical proposition to reality.
The name is a portmanteau of memory and resistor, because its resistance changes depending on how much current has passed through it; it "remembers" that value even after power is turned off.
The history-dependent nature of their electrical properties would make them able to carry out calculations, but most interest has focused on developing them for memory applications, to replace the widespread "flash" solid-state memory of USB sticks and memory cards.
"We`re reaching the limits of what we can do with flash memory in terms of increasing the storage density, and it`s also relatively high power and not as fast as we would like," said Anthony Kenyon of University College London, UK.
However, researchers are still working to get memristor devices out of the laboratory and into consumer electronics. Hewlett-Packard, whose engineers demonstrated the first working memristor, already have plans to bring early memristor designs to market.
Current designs employ expensive or exotic materials, but a real memristor revolution could hinge on making them compatible with existing semiconductor technology, based overwhelmingly on silicon.
Memristors employing more "exotic" materials will probably make it into devices first
That would make them easy and cheap to integrate into existing manufacturing techniques.
Now, Dr Kenyon, his student, and his colleagues from UCL, France and Spain have stumbled across a better way to make silicon memristors.
The team was working on silicon devices for LEDs when they accidentally discovered that a film of silicon oxide on their devices - which forms naturally when silicon is left out in air - behaved as memristors.