nanoREV.

Memristor Business Landscape

Nanotechnology is likely to have a big impact to the non-volatile memory market in the next few years as the further scalabilty of  flash memory becomes more difficult. One interesting solution developed by Hewlett Packard last year is the memristor, a nanoscale circuit element theoretically proposed in 1971 but only recently realized. The memristor does not require transistors to save data and instead uses a voltage controlled alteration of the electrical resistance states of thin film materials to switch between a high and low resistance. It turns out that several other companies such as Samsung, Micron Technologies, Axon Technologies, and Unity Semiconductor all seem to be developing variations of memristor memory to achieve a “transistor-less” memory cell architecture within the next decade.  A review of the business landscape of memristor electronics is available at this link.