The principle of the memristor was first described in 1971, as the fourth basic component of electronic circuits (alongside resistors, capacitors and inductors). Since the 2000s, researchers have suggested that certain types of resistive memory could act as memristors and HP and Intel have entered into a race to produce a commercialised version.
“Memristors require less energy since they work at lower voltages,” explained Jennifer Rupp, professor in the Department of Materials at ETH Zurich. “They can be made much smaller than today’s memory modules, and therefore offer much greater density. This means they can store more megabytes of information per mm2.”
Along with her colleague, chemist Markus Kubicek, Prof Rupp has built a memristor based on a slice of perovskite 5nm thick. She claims that her component has three stable resistive states. As a result, it can not only store the 0 or 1 of a standard bit, but can also be used for information encoded by three states – the 0, 1 and 2 of a ‘trit’.
“Our component could therefore also be useful for a new type of IT that is not based on binary logic, but on a logic that provides for information located ‘between’ the 0 and 1,” continued Prof Rupp. “This has interesting implications for what is referred to as fuzzy logic, which seeks to incorporate a form of uncertainty into the processing of digital information. You could describe it as less rigid computing.”
Another potential application is neuromorphic computing, which aims to use electronic components to reproduce the way in which neurons in the brain process information. “The properties of a memristor at a given point in time depend on what has happened before,” explained Prof Rupp. “This mimics the behaviour of neurons, which only transmit information once a specific activation threshold has been reached.”
Primarily, the researchers at ETH Zurich have characterised the ways in which the component works by conducting electro-chemical studies. “We were able to identify the carriers of electrical charge and understand their relationship with the three stable states,” said Prof Rupp. “This is extremely important knowledge for materials science which will be useful in refining the way the storage operates and in improving its efficiency.”
