Hynix said today that it will develop and manufacture memristors with HP. The products will be called ReRAMs (Resistive Random Access Memory).
“The memristor has storage capacity abilities many times greater than what competing technologies offer”, says Hynix CEO, Dr. S.W. Park.
HP has made memristors in 3nm process technology with a switching speed of 1ns. Memristors have read/write endurance in the hundreds of thousands of cycles and are expected to deliver non-volatile storage as dense as 20GByte per sq centimetre within three years - about twice the expected density of flash in 2013.
The two companies expect to launch commercial product in three years time.
The Hynix statement reads: ‘The two companies will jointly develop new materials and process integration to deliver ReRAM to market by transferring the innovative memristor technology from research to commercial development.’
Hynix reckons memristors could replace flash and act a ‘universal storage medium’ i.e. a memory that can behave as flash, DRAM or hard drive.
‘The memristor, short for “memory resistor,” requires less energy to operate, can retain information even when power is off, and is faster than present solid-state storage technologies,’ says Hynix.
“This agreement brings together HP’s core intellectual property and a first-rate supplier with the capacity to bring this innovation to market in world-class memory on a mass scale,” says Stan Williams, HP senior fellow and founding director of the information and quantum systems laboratory at HP Labs.
ReRAM is based on the principle of the difference in the resistance value of a dielectric material caused by applying a charge. Its state changes to on or off depending on the varying resistance value of the dielectric material.