HP and Hynix plan memristors for 2013

HP and Hynix hope to get memristors, a next-generation non-volatile memory technology, into commercial devices in 2013.

In tests, HP's memristors have met or exceeded flash's capabilities in the important categories — read, write, erase and data retention time — Stan Williams, a senior fellow at HP Labs, told attendees at the International Electronics Forum in Spain, EETimes reported on Monday.

"We have a lot of big plans for it and we're working with Hynix Semiconductor to launch a replacement for flash in the summer of 2013 and also to address the solid-state drive market," Williams said.

A memristor is a circuit element that retains a record of the most recent electrical resistance it has been subject to. It is similar to flash memory because it requires theoretically no power to remain in state but it consists of fewer components.

HP vowed in 2010 to get memristors out of the lab and into products by 2013 so the company seems to have held true to its promise.

Williams also gave comments on which technologies HP sees its memristors competing with.

"In 2014/2015 we'll be going after DRAM and after that the SRAM market," he said.

Besides HP, other companies are working on the next generation of memristor-like non-volatile memory. IBM and various academic institutes have put efforts into phase-change memory, while flash-expert Samsung is known to be conducting investigations into memristors.