By: Alyse Okumura, Marketing Coordinator and Chris Saso, SVP of Technology
Have you thought about a super computer that could function similar to electrical currents and be powered on and off like a light bulb? HP Labs is currently working on memristor technology that was first theorized over 40 years ago in 1971!
The first theories of Memristor came to fruition in 1971 by a circuit theorist Leon Chua. As a missing non-linear passive two-terminal electrical component relating electric charge and magnetic flux linkage….Wow, that’s a mouthful!
Timeline of the research and development of Memristor:
- Initially theorized by Leon Chua in 1971
- 1995 – Stan Williams of HP Labs & his team of researchers founded the IQSL – Information and Quantum Systems Lab, where they built and studied nanoscale electronics; the precursor technology to memristor.
- 2007 – The HP Labs team developed an architecture for hybrid chip using conventional CMOS technology and nanoscale switching devices.
- 2008 – The team invented a fourth fundamental component to join the resistor, capacitor, and inductor: the memristor. They published an article in Nature identifying a link between the 2-terminal resistance switching behavior found in nanoscale systems and memristors.
- 2012 – HP started work on “The Machine”, that uses memristor technology lead by the leadership of Martin Fink, CTO and head of HP Labs. The idea of “The Machine” will be a complete replacement for current computer system architectures with a new operating system, a new type of memory (memristors), and super-fast buses/peripheral interconnects (photonics). For more information about the technology check out this HP Blog post from June 2014.
- June 2014 – HP announces the latest develops and road map to “The Machine” at HP Discover.
We are honored to be hosting Stan Williams, HP Senior Fellow & Director of the Memristor Research Group at HP Labs as one of our guest speakers at this year’s Executive Forum. If you have specific questions you’d like to ask Stan, submit them here. Following the event we will be sharing more from Stan and the other guest speakers in a later blog post. Stay tuned!
Sources:
HP Next – The Machine from HP
Technology Lab – HP Plans to launch memristor, silicon photonic computer
HP – Demystifying the memeristor
Extreme Tech – HP bets it all on The Machine
Wikipedia – Memristor