Researchers at Hewlett Packard have developed a new kind of memory chip called memristors which are far more powerful than the flash memory chips in widespread use and could mimic the functions of the human brain, dpa reported. The company said Thursday that it envisions the new chips coming to market within three years. R Stanley Williams, senior fellow and director of HP's information and quantum systems lab, said the new devices - made of tiny electronic resistors - would enable the development of computers that function more like the human brain. "Since our brains are made of memristors, the flood gate is now open for commercialization of computers that would compute like human brains," he said. The new chips, in addition to being useful in storage devices, can perform logic, enabling computation to one day be performed in chips where data is stored, rather than on a specialized central processing unit. Scientists at HP first demonstrated the existence of the memristor in 2008, and have now advanced the technology to the point where it will be ready for commercial deployment within a few years. The researchers also have designed a new architecture within which multiple layers of memristor memory can be stacked on top of each other in a single chip. The company said the advances would allow computer chip design to continue developing even as conventional silicon designs reach their limits. This would allow the creation of handheld devices that offer ten times greater embedded memory than exists today and far more powerful supercomputers that allow work like movie rendering and genomic research to be done dramatically faster than is possible with current technologies. Other advantages of memristors include far lower energy use than flash memory and the ability to store at least twice as much data in the same area. Memristors can also store information without the need for an electric current, they are virtually immune from radiation, and can enable computers that turn on and off like a light switch, HP said. HP said that the memristors already were faster than today's conventional silicon transistors. The researchers had tested them in the laboratory, proving they could reliably make hundreds of thousands of reads and writes.
