Symmetric Chaos
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Gender: Male Location: Ko-ro-ba
The End Of Transistors
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/science/08chips.html
quote: PALO ALTO, Calif. — Hewlett-Packard scientists on Thursday are to report advances in the design of a new class of diminutive switches capable of replacing transistors as computer chips shrink closer to the atomic scale.
The devices, known as memristors, or memory resistors, were conceived in 1971 by Leon O. Chua, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, but they were not put into effect until 2008 at the H.P. lab here.
They are simpler than today’s semiconducting transistors, can store information even in the absence of an electrical current and, according to a report in Nature, can be used for both data processing and storage applications.
The researchers previously reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had devised a new method for storing and retrieving information from a vast three-dimensional array of memristors. The scheme could potentially free designers to stack thousands of switches in a high-rise fashion, permitting a new class of ultradense computing devices even after two-dimensional scaling reaches fundamental limits.
Memristor-based systems also hold out the prospect of fashioning analog computing systems that function more like biological brains, Dr. Chua said.
“Our brains are made of memristors,” he said, referring to the function of biological synapses. “We have the right stuff now to build real brains.”
In an interview at the H.P. research lab, Stan Williams, a company physicist, said that in the two years since announcing working devices, his team had increased their switching speed to match today’s conventional silicon transistors. The researchers had tested them in the laboratory, he added, proving they could reliably make hundreds of thousands of reads and writes.
That is a significant hurdle to overcome, indicating that it is now possible to consider memristor-based chips as an alternative to today’s transistor-based flash computer memories, which are widely used in consumer devices like MP3 players, portable computers and digital cameras.
“Not only do we think that in three years we can be better than the competitors,” Dr. Williams said. “The memristor technology really has the capacity to continue scaling for a very long time, and that’s really a big deal.”
As the semiconductor industry has approached fundamental physical limits in shrinking the size of the devices that represent digital 1’s and 0’s as on and off states, it has touched off an international race to find alternatives.
New generations of semiconductor technology typically advance at three-year intervals, and today the industry can see no further than three and possibly four generations into the future.
The most advanced transistor technology today is based on minimum feature sizes of 30 to 40 nanometers — by contrast a biological virus is typically about 100 nanometers — and Dr. Williams said that H.P. now has working 3-nanometer memristors that can switch on and off in about a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second.
He said the company could have a competitor to flash memory in three years that would have a capacity of 20 gigabytes a square centimeter.
“We believe that that is at least a factor of two better storage than flash memory will be able to have in that time frame,” he said.
The H.P. technology is based on the ability to use an electrical current to move atoms within an ultrathin film of titanium dioxide. After the location of an atom has been shifted, even by as little as a nanometer, the result can be read as a change in the resistance of the material. That change persists even after the current is switched off, making it possible to build an extremely low-power device.
The new material offers an approach that is radically different from a promising type of storage called “phase-change memory” being pursued by I.B.M., Intel and other companies.
In a phase-change memory, heat is used to shift a glassy material from an amorphous to a crystalline state and back. The switching speed of these systems is slower and requires more power, the H.P. scientists say.
Basically we could have computronium in the relatively near future. Transhumanists rejoice!
On a less giddy note, we may be on the verge of a real revolution in computing on par with the invention of the transistor. Given the relatively few fundamental changes our technology has been making in the last few decades this is great news.
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Apr 12th, 2010 07:52 PM
dadudemon
Senior Member
Gender: Male Location: Bacta Tank.
Re: The End Of Transistors
quote: (post ) Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/science/08chips.html
Basically we could have computronium in the relatively near future. Transhumanists rejoice!
On a less giddy note, we may be on the verge of a real revolution in computing on par with the invention of the transistor. Given the relatively few fundamental changes our technology has been making in the last few decades this is great news.
lol!
I'm writing a paper on memristors for my Operating Systems class. I'm coming up with new ways that scheduling algorithms would have to work with a true universal memory. (Not RAM, it's all just "memory".)
Right now, I'm throwing around how L1 and L2/L3 cache would work. It's so very neat all of the possabilities.
more later...
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Apr 12th, 2010 08:05 PM
King Kandy
Senior Member
Gender: Male Location: United States
Also vacuum-tube type equipment becomes efficient at the nano level.
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Apr 12th, 2010 11:47 PM
Darth Jello
Cheese Spelunker
Gender: Male Location: Denver Metro, CO
hey, as long as they keep making valve sound equipment, solid state can get ****ed.
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Apr 12th, 2010 11:56 PM
jaden101
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Who was the physicist who was disgraced about a decade ago because of his faked papers on biological transistors?
I remember reading about it but can't remember who he was.
I vaguely remember it being heralded as the replacement for standard transistors...Although I also remember the "experts" saying that computing power couldn't increase much more due to transistors getting to the point where they couldn't handle the temperatures involved and so would just melt.
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Last edited by jaden101 on Apr 13th, 2010 at 02:10 AM
Apr 13th, 2010 02:07 AM
Mindship
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"Memristors"?
Almost makes "bulk" look good.
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Apr 13th, 2010 11:25 PM
Symmetric Chaos
Fractal King
Gender: Male Location: Ko-ro-ba
quote: (post ) Originally posted by jaden101
Who was the physicist who was disgraced about a decade ago because of his faked papers on biological transistors?
I remember reading about it but can't remember who he was.
I vaguely remember it being heralded as the replacement for standard transistors.
This appears to be a more serious effort with multiple groups working on it. In fact a lot of important groups are working on some sort of replacement for transistors right now.
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Apr 14th, 2010 01:25 AM
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