Reply #2: To be honest, I don't think even people w tech skills really know if this is... [View All]

[arendt]

a real breakthru or just another press release that will be dead in six months.

You should search wikipedia on "Moore's Law" to understand that the fifty year history of ever more transistors for ever less money is coming to an end. Scientists are frantically looking for ways to get out of the old way of simply shrinking a known system (silicon, photolithography). They have been looking at really strange stuff, like "quantum dots", where you measure whether or not one electron is present in a trap made of a few dozen atoms.

So, a totally new direction like this will definitely be investigated.

But, today's transistors are already being fabricated at 45 nanometers design rules - that is, one dimension of a transistor is on the order of 400 atoms. They can't go any smaller than that. An entire transistor today has only about 1 million atoms.

If these bulk memristor devices can be scaled smaller than 45 nm without loosing their properties, then this may work.

But the devil is in the technological details of fabricating the stuff at this scale in an affordable and reliable way.

arendt