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HP has designed a new architecture within which multiple layers of memristor memory can be stacked on top of each other in a single chip. As a result, the company believes devices incorporating memristor-based chips could hit the market in five years. Such devices would include handheld gadgets offering 10 times greater embedded memory than exists today. In addition, supercomputers could be made “dramatically faster” than what’s predicted in Moore’s law.

 

Moore’s law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, states that the number of transistors placed on an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. The trend has led to dramatic increases in performance at lower energy consumption in each new generation of microprocessor.

 

HP researchers say incorporating the memristor element in chips, rather than shrinking transistors, could lead to faster computers that are more energy efficient. That’s because memristor-based chips require less energy and can store at least twice as much data in the same area as a solid-state drive used today.

 

We anticipate the ability to make more compact and power-efficient computing systems well into the future, even after it is no longer possible to make transistors smaller via the traditional Moore’s law approach

said R. Stanley Williams, senior fellow and director of Information and Quantum Systems Lab at HP, in a statement.

HP’s latest findings were detailed in a paper published this week in the journal Nature.