Memory

Overheard: Memristor is the missing link of integrated circuitry

Electronic theorists have been using the wrong pair of variables all these years–voltage and charge. The missing part of electronic theory was that the fundamental pair of variables is flux and charge. Leon Chua as quoted in ‘Missing link’ memristor created: Rewrite the textbooks?

A memristor can be thought of as a resistor that changes its resistance depending on the amount of current that’s sent through it — and the big deal is that it retains its resistance even after the power is turned off.  Memristors are in the news again because engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed flexible memristor-like electronic memory chips.  It could be big news for consumer electronics because it opens up the possibility that memory chips can be printed just as simply and inexpensively as overhead transparencies.

Overheard: The future of NAND

Removable flash applications, such as cards for cell phones, drive the bulk of today’s NAND market. NAND growth through 2012 will be driven by the computing segment, such as hybrid drives, and solid-state drives going into notebooks, UMPCs, servers, mobile and enterprise storage and data centers. Ciol, NAND market: Where’s Apple?

I had to look up the acronym UMPC. It stands for ultra-mobile personal computer.

Overheard: Programmable Metallization Cell Memory

“All the current limitations in portable electronic storage could go away. You could record video of every event in your life and store it.” Michael Kozicki

There was a re-run of Dallas on today that had JR Ewing making a call from his car. He was wheeling and dealing on this big brick that was connected with a heavy pigtail to a box that sat between his bucket seats. It reminded me of the day we got our first minivan.

The minivan had a car phone. It sounds silly even to say “car phone” now. We pretty much spent the first day entertaining the kids by pulling into friends’ driveways and letting the kids call.

“I’m calling you from the car and we’re in your driveway — look out the window! See me? I’m waving!”

It was a dollar a call, but it was worth it. Boy, that was an exciting day.

That was twenty years ago. Now you see kids in third grade watching DVDs in the car as Mom drives them to Cub Scouts. That need for mobile technology is why Hulu is going to succeed.

Those kids are going to want to watch the latest Simpson episode on their cell phones and the little portable DVD players kids are using now are going to be as clunky as JR Ewing’s car phone.

Having all that video at your fingertips is going to require a lot of memory. And flash is pretty much hit its limit with the iPhone.

I predict the next disruptive technology is going to be ion memory. The technical name is Programmable Metallization Cell memory. It’s nanotechnology that’ll give you a terabyte of storage on a thumb drive.

Alexis Madrigal explains: Programmable Metallization Cell memory stores information in a fundamentally different way from flash. Instead of storing bits as an electronic charge, the technology creates nanowires, from copper atoms the size of a virus, to record binary ones and zeros.

The key enabling technology for the memory is nano-ionics, a field that focuses on moving and transforming positively charged atoms. In PMC memory, the charged atoms, or ions, are harnessed by applying a negative charge, which transforms them into copper atoms lined up to form nanowires.