[myrmidon]

Takes me back... There was significant hype around those things when they first managed to build them at scale (~15 years ago), because they were promising for low power, high density persistent storage and are also academically interesting: The "concept" of memristors was explored over 50 years ago (they are passive components that couple electrical charge and magnetical flux, just like a resistor does with current/voltage, a capacitor with voltage/charge or an inductivity with current/flux).

But I think the main problem was that they never managed to scale up the clock speeds sufficiently, even though structure size (=> density) was already highly promising from the start.

Maybe in a slightly different history with some discoveries in different orders these could have replaced flash memory in SSDs completely.

But that whole episode thought me that betting on early technology is hard, and always a risky business, because no matter how promising an approach looks, if it turns out that you can not find the necessary improvements in only a single dimension, then the whole thing is kinda doomed and will probably never be competitive (=> a highly relevant insight especially when speculating about things like novel battery chemistries or the like).

[ants_everywhere]

> if it turns out that you can not find the necessary improvements in only a single dimension, then the whole thing is kinda doomed and will probably never be competitive

I don't know, we've been working on digital computers since at least the late 1800s. Sometimes technology just takes a while.

That does make it hard to gamble on it if the time horizon is longer than you need to make a profit.

But I don't think we should convince ourselves that a technology that takes longer than 15 years to become profitable is doomed. If we thought like that we'd still be subsistence hunter gatherers.

[myrmidon]

Absolutely! For the record: I don't think that memristors are doomed to be useless-- we'll have to find out.

My point is just that even with research-tech that sounds absolutely amazing (low power, persistent, high density) you just need to fail on a single dimension for it to basically become irrelevant.

This is also why its so easy for media to overhype research results, which (predictably) results in continuous disappointments and loss of trust (of the public) in science reporting and/or even science in general...

[nine_k]

Regarding technology taking time: look at LEDs.

- The effect first discovered: 1907.

- First prototype device built: 1927.

- First commercially viable parts shipping: early 1960s.

- Ubiquitous and cheap as an indicator device: 1980s.

- Highly efficient, used for lighting: 2010s.

The principle never changed along the way. The specific materials changed quite a bit.

[bcrl]

And we only have blue LEDs due to the sheer stubbornness of Shuji Nakamura. If you haven't already heard the tale of its development, head over here and enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF8d72mA41M

[cma]

EUV took decades:

> To address the challenge of EUV lithography, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories were funded in the 1990s to perform basic research into the technical obstacles. The results of this successful effort were disseminated via a public/private partnership Cooperative R&D Agreement (CRADA) with the invention and rights wholly owned by the US government, but licensed and distributed under approval by DOE and Congress.[3] The CRADA consisted of a consortium of private companies and the Labs, manifested as an entity called the Extreme Ultraviolet Limited Liability Company (EUV LLC).[4]

> Intel, Canon, and Nikon (leaders in the field at the time), as well as the Dutch company ASML and Silicon Valley Group (SVG) all sought licensing. Congress denied[citation needed] the Japanese companies the necessary permission, as they were perceived[by whom?] as strong technical competitors at the time and should not benefit from taxpayer-funded research at the expense of American companies.[5] In 2001 SVG was acquired by ASML, leaving ASML as the sole benefactor of the critical technology.[6]

>By 2018, ASML succeeded in deploying the intellectual property from the EUV-LLC after several decades of developmental research

[DrBazza]

Is that actually the case? Or have memristors just proven to be a 'boring' technology that's just quietly replaced other bits and pieces that we don't hear about? A bit like graphene was supposed to be this wonder material, and now it's found in the soles of trail and hiking boots.

[myrmidon]

> Or have memristors just proven to be a 'boring' technology that's just quietly replaced other bits and pieces that we don't hear about?

As far as I know, they have no application apart from academic toy/reseearch subject right now. And you have to consider that there are a lot of niches for storage technology that they could have taken over (because there is a lot of tradeoffs to make, e.g. latency, bandwidth, persistence, density, power consumption).

We might be just a few breakthoughs from those things replacing flash memory in SSDs, or revolutionizing neural-network accelerator hardware, but I am quite skeptical for now.

Note: I still believe that this (and other stuff i'm skeptical about) is SUPER worthwhile to research and always a huge uphill battle, simply because we have invested hundreds of billions of dollars into improvements of CMOS technology and processes, and collected over half a century of experience with it...

But new tech is to me kinda like a startup-- not every technology is the future, just like not every startup is a unicorn. Investing is still the right move, but you have to be realistic about expectations (which modern media is absolutely not)

[chc4]

I'm under the impression Intel's 3D XPoint/Optane memory was based off the same process used for memristors.

[mapt]

This was always a strange point of contention - Intel denied using memristors. I assume there were some sort of patent or trademark issues.

WP:

"Development of 3D XPoint began around 2012.[8] Intel and Micron had developed other non-volatile phase-change memory (PCM) technologies previously;[note 1] Mark Durcan of Micron said 3D XPoint architecture differs from previous offerings of PCM, and uses chalcogenide materials for both selector and storage parts of the memory cell that are faster and more stable than traditional PCM materials like GST.[10] But today, it is thought of as a subset of ReRAM.[11] According to patents a variety of materials can be used as the chalcogenide material.[12][13][14]

3D XPoint has been stated to use electrical resistance and to be bit addressable.[15] Similarities to the resistive random-access memory under development by Crossbar Inc. have been noted, but 3D XPoint uses different storage physics.[8] Specifically, transistors are replaced by threshold switches as selectors in the memory cells.[16] 3D XPoint developers indicate that it is based on changes in resistance of the bulk material.[2] Intel CEO Brian Krzanich responded to ongoing questions on the XPoint material that the switching was based on "bulk material properties".[3] Intel has stated that 3D XPoint does not use a phase-change or memristor technology,[17] although this is disputed by independent reviewers.[18]

According to reverse engineering firm TechInsights, 3D XPoint uses germanium-antimony-tellurium (GST) with low silicon content as the data storage material which is accessed by ovonic threshold switches (OTSes)[19][20] made of ternary phased selenium-germanium-silicon with arsenic doping.[21][22]"

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Yes, but they were never able to get the performance to the point where it could be used as regular memory as opposed to storage (SSD).

[mapt]

IIRC, performance was fantastic, but they were never able/willing to match the data density and data cost improvements in stacked-NAND flash, and without forcing themselves into the market at competitive rates, nobody wanted to write applications or design hardware suited to their unique strengths as low-latency caches.

There is still, to this day, a numerical niche for these drives, which is being served imperfectly by either normal TLC drives of very large size, SLC cache drives, or DRAM expansion cards connecting to the CPU through a PCIE bus. Just not at the prices they wanted to charge.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

But wasn't the potentially transformative market intended to be "persistent DRAM" for instant-on devices removing the distinction between memory and storage, requiring DRAM-like speed rather than NAND-like speed ?

I recall their early R/W speed performance projections being far faster than what they ever achieved with Optane drives.

[hwillis]

> graphene was supposed to be this wonder material, and now it's found in the soles of trail and hiking boots.

I mean, that's not because graphene has become a routine part of our material repertoire. It has no reason to be in those things, does nothing, and is just marketing fuel. We may put "graphene" in things, but we are not much closer to using its interesting properties.

[marcosdumay]

Right now, graphene is an amazing component of filters and composite materials. But only of the very expensive kinds of those.

We don't put it on a lot of things. It's expensive as hell.

[marcosdumay]

They never promised high-density. Semiconductor memristors were always fated at staying at a much lower density than the same amount of capacitive memory. And that's before you get into the manufacturing issues and the problem that it loses "data" when read.

Those things where hyped out of nowhere, with lots of blatant lies making into the popular discourse (like that high-density prediction). I don't even know why, because nobody was making any serious bet on them. They are a very interesting design, that may still get some real-world usage (the manufacturing problems are a showstopper right now), but won't ever compete with flash.

[mikewarot]

I think that Memristors are perfect for use as configuration RAM for FPGAs and FPGA-like things. Something that you want to be able to update, but not frequently, and read all the time.

Of course, then the question becomes one of refreshing their state, like DRAM.

[floating-io]

I remember that too; I was very, very interested, but it never materialized. Very disappointing.

That said, I think this is something a bit different, or at least a different application. If my translation of the summary is correct (I'm not very fluent in sciencese), it's basically using them as some kind of matrix multiplier rather than memory. Whether they're making use of power-off data retention at all was unclear to me, but then I just skimmed it.

Interesting, but I was really hoping for fast, persistent memory to appear.