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May 5, 2008
Britney vs. Nanotech: Breakdown or Breakthrough?
This article appears in "Nano News Free Article" in the "May 5, 2008" issue.
It’s likely that, if you follow the nightly news, read the paper or even scan your customized Google News
browser, you missed one of the biggest scientific discoveries to come
around in a long time. No, it wasn’t that Britney got the kids back.
Let’s
put it this way: Since a scientist theorized that this component was
possible, it has taken more than 37 years for scientists to actually
build it. Yes, I’m talking about science, the stuff that makes things
go and helps us manage how we live on the planet. And this was really,
really big.
Here’s what a buddy of mine, an electrical engineer
from one of the nation’s top tech schools—Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute—wrote to me when he saw the story. His subject line was
simply: “WOW.”
A memristor was sort of like the Lost City of Atlantis. Except HP has just proven that they are real, and it has made them.
No. 1: Buy HP stock.
I would assume that, unless they screw this up, they will already have patented a few devices that would be based on this technology.
If they’re first to market with applications of this, if this is in fact anywhere near production ready, this will be a FUNDAMENTAL change in the memory and hard drive market. You can forget about hard disks, solid state drives and all the people making flash memory. HP says that currently they are 10 times slower than regular DRAM [dynamic random access memory], but this is still vastly faster than flash memory or regular hard drives. With fractional power requirements. And small.
OK, now that I have calmed down, the question really is: How much time to market for this? I hope to learn more over the next few days. It isn't every day that a fundamental physics discovery is made or a hypothesis proven.
Google news shows only 163 news items about this right now. Seems like nobody has realized what this could mean yet...
No. 1: Buy HP stock.
I would assume that, unless they screw this up, they will already have patented a few devices that would be based on this technology.
If they’re first to market with applications of this, if this is in fact anywhere near production ready, this will be a FUNDAMENTAL change in the memory and hard drive market. You can forget about hard disks, solid state drives and all the people making flash memory. HP says that currently they are 10 times slower than regular DRAM [dynamic random access memory], but this is still vastly faster than flash memory or regular hard drives. With fractional power requirements. And small.
OK, now that I have calmed down, the question really is: How much time to market for this? I hope to learn more over the next few days. It isn't every day that a fundamental physics discovery is made or a hypothesis proven.
Google news shows only 163 news items about this right now. Seems like nobody has realized what this could mean yet...
Now, I’m not sure about the investment advice at this point. (HP seems a bit high in its range right now.) But after doing my own reading, this isn’t just huge for tech geeks. This is going to revolutionize all manner of electronic components.
One small example: A 16-gigabyte flash memory is very big by today’s commercial standards. In that same space, using memristors, you could fit 100 gigabytes.
There’s plenty of other advantages. But that should go without saying when you’re talking about a fundamental passive circuit element that’s going to mean rewriting almost every electrical engineering textbook from April 30, 2008, going forward.
And what's the enabling technology behind it? Nanotechnology.
This is from the HP team’s abstract in Nature magazine regarding its discovery:
Anyone
who ever took an electronics laboratory class will be familiar with the
fundamental passive circuit elements: the resistor, the capacitor and
the inductor. However, in 1971 Leon Chua reasoned from symmetry
arguments that there should be a fourth fundamental element, which he
called a memristor (short for memory resistor). Although he showed that
such an element has many interesting and valuable circuit properties,
until now no one has presented either a useful physical model or an
example of a memristor. Here we show, using a simple analytical
example, that memristance arises naturally in nanoscale
systems in which solid-state electronic and ionic transport are coupled
under an external bias voltage. These results serve as the foundation
for understanding a wide range of hysteretic current–voltage behavior
observed in many nanoscale electronic devices that involve the motion of charged atomic or molecular species, in particular certain titanium dioxide cross-point switches.
As I’ve noted repeatedly, here’s a major breakthrough, yet it doesn’t splash into the papers or hit the TV screens. But this will more fundamentally change the way we, our children and our grandchildren live than who wins the Richmond Crown Royal 400 or even the presidency and Congress this November. Dare I say, it may even be more important than Britney Spears' latest debacle or the release of Grand Theft Auto IV.
If you’re still interested in this story and can stay away from the Wii for a few more minutes, the two following stories will give you some idea of what has sent the geeks aflutter: HP Reveals Memristor, The Fourth Passive Circuit Element and HP Rewires Electronics.