The Memristor, A Resistor with Memory, Could Replace The Transistor

Transistors have been an integral part of computing for many years and are the foundation of all microchip technology. Transistors have been scaled down in size to nano-levels to where we can fit billions of electronic transistors on a single microchip. However, there’s a limit. So, what’s next? Memristors. Memristors have much more capacity to improve power and performance far beyond what transistors are capable of. They pack more power in a smaller area, have less power needs, and are resistant to radiation.

UK universities have been working on creating memristor design tools. Their research will hopefully make it so memristors can be commercialized. The commercialization of memristors will be reliant on these universities’ research to make prices reasonable and make it so that they work with existing electronic transistors. This is vital because many companies will not replace transistor factories with memristor factories. With the uncertainty of current methods to produce the memristor, the investment to make these factories will be stalled until the research is completed. The target for these goals is 3 years.

The integration of memristors will be the primary catalyst for commercializing them, the importance of electronic microprocessors is still present even with emerging technologies like memristors. Microprocessors seem to be one of the keys to this technology being commercialized. The other key component to its success is ReRAM. This is important because “Resistance Random Access Memory” uses less energy and has reduced latency, drastically improving performance.

Due to the exciting future of microprocessors and its components, including transistors and memristors, demand will increase on both. Many companies will be searching for transistor-based microprocessors once memristors emerge as the new tech.