New memristor better mimics synapses
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New memristor better mimics synapses
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: New memristor better mimics synapses
#2Was the transistor theoretically proposed similar to the memristor was? Wondering if people had as much hype for the transistor eventually appearing as we are about memristors.
Re: New memristor better mimics synapses
#3So the memristor has been physically proven? I thought there was skepticism over whether it was even possible to make them.
Re: New memristor better mimics synapses
#4What are the merits of memristors over solid state NAND and Intel optane technology?
Re: New memristor better mimics synapses
#5So the memristor has been physically proven? I thought there was skepticism over whether it was even possible to make them.
HP/HPE has patents on them and has supposedly made a ton in their labs, but hasn't seemed to get the costs down to make them commercially viable, and may have gotten trapped into some (interesting, but diverting) rabbit holes in the process not helping them commercialize the existing work, such as believing they need to reinvent the computer almost entirely from scratch just because of the memristor [0].
[0] "The Machine". There's a lot of weird stuff around on it. Official hype page of the (now cancelled, presumably) project: https://www.labs.hpe.com/the-machine (Makes some of IBM's Watson marketing almost look sane in comparison, doesn't it?)
Re: New memristor better mimics synapses
#6So the memristor has been physically proven? I thought there was skepticism over whether it was even possible to make them.
Most of the materials used for this purpose have properties where the resistivity changes as a function of the charge which has gone through it. You can reset the material by a thermal cycle or by applying a larger current through it.
Re: New memristor better mimics synapses
#7So the memristor has been physically proven? I thought there was skepticism over whether it was even possible to make them.
Need to catch a ride, but here's a quick link where you can make your own memristors and see for yourself. Basically requires two dissimilar metals and an oxidizer:
Re: New memristor better mimics synapses
#8What are the merits of memristors over solid state NAND and Intel optane technology?
Solid state non-volatile storage technologies such as NOR and NAND flash memory use something called floating-gate transistors [1]. Making these transistors is highly complex, and substantial amounts of research efforts have gone into R&D to improve NOR and NAND technologies.
A real issue with these memory technologies is wear. There is a finite amount of times a NOR/NAND gate can be written, and the implementation of wear leveling prolongs the lifespan of the memory device without solving the root issue.
Optane memory (originally called 3D XPoint) starts getting closer to the theoretical ideal of a memristor. According to [2], Optane allows a "memory cell to be written to or read without requiring a transistor." It's still not entirely sure what's the enabling technology, but the general consensus is that Optane is a form of resistive RAM, or ReRAM [3]. Not quite the memristor, but it's edging toward it.
Why memristors? Imagine you're given a piece of conductive material which changes its resistivity based on net current flow over time. It's just a chunk of material, so manufacturing memory cells goes from etching transistors to material deposition. Also, you can likely make the memristors smaller than today's transistors, meaning higher storage densities. Additionally, the memory should be bit-addressable unlike block-addressed NAND. Also, the memristor is fundamentally an analog device, meaning there's the potential for interesting innovations in storage technology (analog storage elements?). Finally, energy consumption should be even lower than transistors.
Takeaways: - NOR/NAND storage is transistor-based and will eventually be replaced with neuromorphic technologies such as memristors. - Optane storage exhibits expected properties of a memristor, but it's not quite a true memristor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/9541/intel-announces-optane-s... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint
Re: New memristor better mimics synapses
#9Was the transistor theoretically proposed similar to the memristor was? Wondering if people had as much hype for the transistor eventually appearing as we are about memristors.
According to [1], "[b]ecause the production of high-quality semiconductor materials was still decades away, Lilienfeld's solid-state amplifier ideas would not have found practical use in the 1920s and 1930s, even if such a device had been built."
It seems like there are parallels. Chua theorized about the memristor in the 1970s, but the first one wasn't created until the 2000s. A question I don't have the answer to: a transistor is to a vacuum tube as a memristor is to what?
Re: New memristor better mimics synapses
#10What are the merits of memristors over solid state NAND and Intel optane technology?
In theory memristors should be faster than flash and with significantly better write endurance. Additionally, the memristor can be used as the basis of computing. Meaning you could potentially create a device which had programmable logic like an FPGA but could reconfigure itself much faster and operate at the speed of a dedicated ASIC (CPU/GPU, etc.)