HP aims to supplant flash memory with memristors by 2013
Memristors, it’s okay if you haven’t heard of them before now. But if HP and new partner Hynix have their way, memristors will be in everything electronic you own within five years. The partnership (Hynix is a semiconductor company) aims to mass produce and popularize memristors, a new type of solid state memory that promises to be faster by at least ten times and significantly more resilient to write/rewrite than the flash memory chips that handle storage needs for so many of our devices (including all Palm phones).
Memristors aren’t just faster and longer-lasting. According to HP they’re also more power efficient, to the tune of drawing one tenth the power. To make things even more fun, they’ll be able to work with the same chipsets, pin connections, and protocols as current day memory chips, so manufacturers wouldn’t have to make serious changes to their build process or coding to be compatible with the new chips.
So you might be thinking to yourself, “Great, another flexible display product we won’t see for ten years.” HP and Hynix want to put you into your place, and aim to have memristors in mass distribution by 2013 (that’s three years from now, if you’re keeping track). Additionally, they hope to leverage HP and Hynix’s scale to produce the memristor chips at a cost that is competitive with flash chips. Of course, there’s no telling how development is going to go in the coming years, and there’s also no saying how supply and demand are going to affect flash prices over that same time. Either way, we’re actually more excited about memristors than we are about flexible displays or webOS printers.
Source: Engadget
