"Further evidence that memristors have the potential to make an impact on real world computing, says Stanley Williams (right) director of HP’s Information & Quantum Systems Lab and lead researcher on the project.

“Our research is now moving out of the lab and towards fabrication of memristor-based circuitry,” he reports. “And as we’re getting closer to the practical implementation of memristor technology, we’re learning more and more about it.”

Last year, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology found the Memristor component promising for potential applications in medicine and other fields.

Using a low cost sol-gel process, depositing a thin film of Ti02 on polymer sheet and adding metal contacts, the team created a flexible memory switch that operates on less than 10V, maintains its memory when power is lost, and still functions after flexing more than 4,000 times.

Memristors that could perform logic, might be used to create computer processors, suggests Williams. And since those processors could be made with industry-standard materials and processes, Memristors should extend Moore’s Law past the point where silicon technology runs up against insurmountable technical barriers, he says.

Williams expects to see Memristors used in computer memory chips in the next few years and HP Labs already has production-ready architecture for a chip.

Memristors require less energy to operate than current alternatives, such as flash memory. They store data in approximately half the space required by flash chips and are virtually immune to radiation interference – making them highly attractive to manufacturers needing ever-smaller but ever-more-powerful devices.

William’s group research has suggested how memristor memory could be combined with silicon processors in a multi-dimensional processor framework to create a hybrid chip - a significant advance for ‘computer on a chip.’

Machines equipped with such processors would be useful for any compute-and memory-intense tasks like seismic surveying, animation rendering or space research.

Eventually, memristor-based processors might replace the silicon in the smart display screens found in e-readers, says Williams, and even become the successors to silicon on a larger scale. “Memristors are allowing us to think about different ways of doing computing. And we’re only just starting to really understand the long term potential that they have.”