Text Size
April 2009 | Home
U-M HERITAGE »
Hard times
What happens to students' values when the economy tanks?
Sports »
Lucky man
Jim Abbott became one of U-M's best and most beloved athletes, despite playing with only one hand.
Most emailed stories
- U-M Heritage: How to date women, circa 1943
- U-M top U.S. public university in World University Rankings
- The Doors' disaster at Michigan
Ideas
Toward the end of paper
What does it mean when newspapers no longer publish on paper, and books aren't made on presses?
Health
Intense bladder cancer treatment does not improve survival
Patients who receive more tests and intensive treatments do not seem to survive longer than patients with milder interventions.
TALKING ABOUT WORDS »
Car names
Detroit's troubled auto industry has done more than build vehicles. It's also come up with a trunk-load of car names.
TALKING ABOUT MOVIES »
M-ollywood
Michigan is trying to turn itself into a mecca for moviemakers. So far it seems to be working.
An online magazine for alumni and friends of U-M.
Navigation
Follow us on Facebook
- Letters to the Editor
- Your U-M History
- Alumni Notes
- Alumni Books and
Arts - Alumni Websites
- Archives
- U-M Resources
Maps, Events, and other helpful links
- Michigan Stories
U-M publications
- University Record
- RSS
-
Sign Up For Michigan Today Monthly Email
- Update your address
- Contact Us
- Unsubscribe
Research News
U-M engineer's memristor chip could lead to faster, cheaper computers
April 14, 2009
The memristor is a computer component that offers both memory and logic functions in one simple package. It has the potential to transform the semiconductor industry, enabling smaller, faster, cheaper chips and computers.
A University of Michigan electrical engineer has taken a step toward this end by building a chip composed of nanoscale memristors that can store up to 1 kilobit of information.
Previously, only a few memristor circuits had been demonstrated, rather than such a large-scale array, due to reliability and reproducibility issues. While 1 kilobit is not a huge amount of information, the researchers consider it a leap that will make it easier to scale the technology so it can store much more data.
"We demonstrated CMOS-compatible, ultra-high-density memory arrays based on a silicon memristive system. This is an important first step." said Wei Lu, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. CMOS stands for complementary metal oxide semiconductor. It is the technology used in modern microchips.
Moore's law, which predicts that technology will double the number of transistors that fit on an integrated circuit every two years, has held true since the mid 1960s. The more transistors on a chip, the faster the chip can operate. But this is getting more and more difficult to achieve, Lu said.
"This transistor scaling now faces several practical and fundamental challenges including increased power dissipation as transistors shrink, difficulties in laying out all the necessary interconnects, and the high cost to minimize device variations," Lu said. "Memristors have a simpler structure and are attractive for applications such as memories because it is much easier to pack a large number of them on a single chip to achieve the highest possible density."
The density of a memristor-based memory chip could be at least an order of magnitude—a factor of 10—higher than current transistor-based chips. Such high density circuits can also be very fast, Lu says. You could save data to a memristor memory three orders of magnitude faster than saving to today's flash memory, for example.
Another benefit of memristor memory is that it's not volatile, as today's DRAM memory is. DRAM, which stands for dynamic random access memory, is part of your computer's quick-access memory that helps the machine run faster. DRAM is overwritten multiple times a second because it fades with time. Memristor memory would not have to be overwritten. It is more stable.
Lu says memristors could open the door to universal memory. And because of how densely they can be crammed onto integrated circuits, memristors also offer hope for robust biologically-inspired logic circuits. Each neuron in the human brain is connected to 10,000 other neurons through synapses, Lu says. Engineers can't achieve that kind of connectivity with today's transistor-based circuits. But memristor circuits could potentially overcome this problem.
is a writer with the University of Michigan News Service.