A paper in Nature says that HP scientists have devised a way to use memristors, described devices with the properties of a memory element and a resistor, to make ICs which can scale better than ICs made with transistors.
Whereas today's leading edge processes are 32/28nm, HP has made memristors in 3nm process te3chnology with a switching speed of 1ns.
'Recently, ultra-dense resistive memory arrays built from various two-terminal semiconductor or insulator thin film devices have been demonstrated', states the Nature paper, 'among these, bipolar voltage-actuated switches have been identified as physical realizations of 'memristors' or memristive devices, combining the electrical properties of a memory element and a resistor.'
The paper adds: ' Incorporated within an appropriate circuit17, 18, memristive switches can thus perform 'stateful' logic operations for which the same devices serve simultaneously as gates (logic) and latches19 (memory) that use resistance instead of voltage or charge as the physical state variable.'
The HP memristor works by using electrical current to change the location of atoms in a thin film of titanium dioxide. Moving the atoms causes a change in resistance. That changed state remains after the current is turned off.
The HP scientists say that memristors could be used for both non-volatile memory and for logic. Memristors are said to be stackable allowing 3D circuits.
Stan Williams of HP told The New York Times that memristors' switching speed matched that of today's transistors and had read/write endurance measured in the 'hundreds of thousands' of cycles
Williams also said that memristors could be competitive with transistors within three years, and could scale for 'a very long time'. The leakiness and expense of transistor scaling are suggesting fundamental limits are three or four generations away.
Williams said memristors could deliver non-volatile storage as dense as 20GByte per sq centimetre within three years which he reckons would be a factor of two better than what conventional flash memory can achieve in that timeframe.