In a recent study, a team of researchers from Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, have fabricated and demonstrated a hybrid memristor/transistor circuit for the first time. The team demonstrated conditional programming of a nanomemristor by the hybrid circuit, showing that the same elements in a circuit can be configured to act as logic, signal routing, and memory. By routing a logic operation’s output signal back onto a memristor, the circuit could even reconfigure itself, opening the doors to a variety of self-programming circuits.
“It actually takes at least a dozen transistors to mimic the electrical properties of a single memristor,” Stan Williams of HP told PhysOrg.com. “Thus, for circuits that require some type of latching or other function performed by a memristor, it is at least conceivable for a designer to replace several active transistors with one passive memristor, which is much smaller than a single transistor. This maintains the capability of the chip while decreasing the number of transistors, which saves both silicon area and power. Thus, it may be possible to continue the equivalent of Moore's law for a couple of generations not by making transistors smaller, but by replacing some subset of them with memristors.”
