Posted on Thursday, June 27 2013 @ 12:11 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Memory maker SK Hynix announced its memristor-based ReRAM memory has been further delayed. The first customers to receive the memory are HP, IBM and Toshiba, but SK Hynix is struggling with making ReRAM cost-efficient, and shipments won't happen until 2015 at the earliest.
“Whether it will be mass-produced or not will depend on its cost-competitiveness in the market. It will only happen in 2015 at the earliest,” said Lee Jung Hoon, head of the SK Hynix advanced device and process integration division, in an interview with Bloomberg agency.
SK Hynix teamed up with Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Toshiba to develop ReRAM memory chips. As a result, these three companies will get produced ReRAM first from SK Hynix.
The memristor, short for “memory resistor,” requires less energy to operate, can retain information even when power is off, and is faster than present solid-state storage technologies. It works by manipulating only a handful of atoms to produce a dramatic change in electrical resistance and therefore needs to be made using very advanced nano-scale process technologies. It was postulated to be the fourth basic circuit element by professor Leon Chua of UC Berkeley in 1971 and first intentionally reduced to practice by researchers in HP Labs, the company’s central research arm, in 2006. The technology can also perform logic, enabling computation to one day be performed in chips where data is stored, rather than on a specialized central processing unit.
