#MATERIALS: "IMEC Hawks Memristors at VLSI Symposia"

The next generation of memory devices will eliminate the need for transistors, instead sandwiching a memristive material between metallic crossbars, thus affording ultra-high densities that can also be read and written very quickly. Hewlett Packard, Sharp and Samsung are all working on resistive RAMs that promise to replace all other types of memory--from flash to DRAM: R. Colin Johnson


IMEC's resistive random access memory (RRAM) sandwiches hafnium-oxide memristive material between metal electrodes. Source: IMEC

Here is what EETimes says about memristors: The Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (IMEC) will report next month on progress to make its memristor variation, called resistive-RAMs (RRAM), the dominate memory technology in four papers at the VLSI Symposia in Honolulu.

At the Symposia June 12 to 15, IMEC (Leuven, Belgium), which claims RRAM will be ready for reliable mass production below 20 nanometers, will describe its cross-bar architecture. IMEC claims the architecture is denser, faster and lower-power than flash, but suitable to replace any memory type, including DRAMs.

IMEC and other research groups backing variations of the memristor claim that, in the future, a single universal memory technology will replace flash memory and all vintages of random-access memories. The memristor was invented by by professor Leon Chua at the University of California-Berkeley and has been championed by Hewlett-Packard Co...
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