Linear, symmetric, self-selecting 14-bit molecular memristors (2023)

Takes me back... There was significant hype around those things when they first managed to build them at scale (~15 years ago), because they were promising for low power, high density persistent storage and are also academically interesting: The "concept" of memristors was explored over 50 years ago (they are passive components that couple electrical charge and magnetical flux, just like a resistor does with current/voltage, a capacitor with voltage/charge or an inductivity with current/flux).

But I think the main problem was that they never managed to scale up the clock speeds sufficiently, even though structure size (=> density) was already highly promising from the start.

Maybe in a slightly different history with some discoveries in different orders these could have replaced flash memory in SSDs completely.

But that whole episode thought me that betting on early technology is hard, and always a risky business, because no matter how promising an approach looks, if it turns out that you can not find the necessary improvements in only a single dimension, then the whole thing is kinda doomed and will probably never be competitive (=> a highly relevant insight especially when speculating about things like novel battery chemistries or the like).

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I remember that too; I was very, very interested, but it never materialized. Very disappointing.

That said, I think this is something a bit different, or at least a different application. If my translation of the summary is correct (I'm not very fluent in sciencese), it's basically using them as some kind of matrix multiplier rather than memory. Whether they're making use of power-off data retention at all was unclear to me, but then I just skimmed it.

Interesting, but I was really hoping for fast, persistent memory to appear.

The original pre-print is available at: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-3647379/v1

which is probably a less spammy source than the ResearchGate link.

Our current society converts chemical energy to electrical, not the other way round. So its the electrical energy user that needs a lossy conversion step.