New memristor better mimics synapses(news.umich.edu) |
New memristor better mimics synapses(news.umich.edu) |
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?
[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?)
It starts with an idea that looks good on paper and a bunch of scientists investigating it. At one point it gets picked up by the management of a company and commercialization is being started while the technology is not ready yet. Now you have high-risk development of a new technology in the framework of commercial management. Failing is no option anymore. During the development it becomes clear to some insiders that the goals cannot be achieved. To those are three options. Either they quit, they shut up or they upsell what they have. Plans become bigger and bigger and the deadline shifts later and later. The later you are, the more sunk costs you have and the bigger your plans need to be to recoup the costs and keep your department alive. This is what I consider the when it becomes a scam. It started with science but instead of burying the dead horse it is paraded around town and management applauds while those who know do not talk.
HP Memristors are suspended nano-wires surrounded by a floating ring of titanium oxide insulator forming a coaxial line whose impedance/resistance is a function of the cross section of the oxide ring. Current causes the ring compress or stretch giving a memristance function of roughly a parabola which saturates when the oxide is fully stretched or compressed. Last I looked, there are a lot of legal battles currently ongoing and patent litigation involving HP and memristors which is tying the technology up.
Other Memristors commonly work by dendrite formation along electric fields but this method is pretty dang slow. Charge trapping semi-conductor junctions have been proposed but I haven't seen any myself.
This new memristor from U of M works by controlling Lithium diffusion via an electric field. The amount of Lithium available controls the formation of lattice networks in the substrate which in turn controls the conductivity of the material.
And here's a where I did asked previous questions on the topic: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/76097/what-a...
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
That's used for MLC/TLC.
A lesson for all: the bigger man does not quit, does not keep quiet, does not pacify in the face of evil. Contrary to the truthisms about being the bigger man - fighting for what is right is almost always the right move.
It is often said one should be mature and not "play the game." But the truth is, evil affects us all and isn't confined to isolated games. If you don't stop it locally, it will spread like a poison globally.
Learn from my mistake. Play the game, fight, dont quit.
Theranos, IBM "Watson" (in reality a family of products sold as one "AI" thing leeching the branding of the chess playing AI, and very underperforming), the "quantum computing" thing...
(I'd add Tesla "auto-but-not-really-auto" pilot...)