Together with memristors, in-memory compute is likely going to be a big deal. It's already here in some forms, see e.g. Content Addressable Memory in high end networking gear.

Memristors aren't huge yet, are they? Don't they have wear issues? Who is working on them?

They're definitely not huge right now and I haven't seen any viable paths toward them becoming a big thing any time in the near future. There's barely any work being put into them relative to other stuff in the field. HP made some big claims years back but have totally failed to deliver anything and I haven't heard anything about the technology in years.

Prior to the pandemic I had the privilege, due to my wife's position, of attending five or so IEEE conferences per year in the subject of microelectronics and got to see a lot the small enhancements. 15 years ago MEMS and SOI was all the rage, and it moved at glacial pace, and "nothing was coming of it." Now you cannot pick up a modern smartphone without having most of those small developments packed inside it. It's frustrating in one way, seeing the cute piglet of a fringe idea entering the pipe, and wondering if it will come to aught, and astounding to finally put the metaphorical sausage of productization in your mouth many years later thinking to yourself "Oh, I had forgotten all about that..." I use the food metaphor because my wife used to work in market research and those tasty MSG-laden noodles we all devoured on a student's grocery budget took years of refinement through market testing before they became a real product available universally everywhere.

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More than 20 years ago, I read about new FRAM/FeRAM chip that just got commercialized that was supposed to revolutionize non-volatile storage. And the specs were pretty good, definitely much better that flash.

And yet today, nothing came out of it. Sure, you can still buy FeRAM at digikey, and it found a niche or two by itself, but it is tiny, tiny piece of overall storage market.

I think that memristor is going to end up as FRAM and not as MEMS. It is cute, but even if it could be executed perfectly, it does not allow anything that more conventional technologies can do (unlike MEMS :) l

I remember FRAM now that you mention it. There's obviously a lot of promising technologies that die through poor marketing, poor adoption, price, better performing or cheaper alternatives. I see potential in memristors but I think the jury is still out on whether it will see marketplace success. I personally think it has huge upside potential but it sounds like both of us have seen all that be for nothing. I think my previous comment carries more weight though, because it has a pig on it.

I feel like memresistors have been hyped since HP tried to use it to save their business from 2007-2015. Nothing ever came from it from HP at least. Have there been new developments that make it more likely to be viable?

A lot of technology that's out at the fringes will often be hyped up by a marketing department. It is the culinary equivalent of telling everyone how awesome the soup is going to taste just as the cook is returning from the grocery store with the unprepared, raw ingredients. We're edging closer to the "needs seasoning." There's always some company trying to sell something that doesn't really exist in a production form, and then 10 years or 20 years later, it is so in the background we don't even think of it anymore. You know how pricing works? Multiply by ten for every step from cost of raw materials to a commercial product in your hand? 10x to turn the raw materials in components. 10x to turn components in to a product. 10x to move the product to the store. 10x to sell it to you as an item you can use. Same kind of idea when it comes to technology research, but in terms of time. Six months of research becomes five years of development becomes ten years of commercialization becomes twenty years of "it's everywhere."

I'll point out that transistors were invented in 1947 and the computer industry made the switch from vacuum tubes to transistors around 1958. Integrated circuits were invented in 1958 and the computer industry switched to them around 1965. My point is that historically the computer industry has been able to switch to a completely new technology a decade after it's invented. HP's memristors have been around for 15 years and haven't made much impact.

If you look at IBM's history you can see how reliability and the ability to manufacture components in quantity played a huge role in the adaptation of both. Bell Lab's early point contact ones weren't manufacturable. IBM didn't move to proper ICs until 1970 with the System/370 because anything they made including the low end would be sold in quantities too high for ICs before then (System/360 Models 85 and 195 preceded the 370s, but the only sold 60 total).

So memristors are almost here, is that what you're saying?

No idea. For example, between the development of core memory and DRAM there were a host of technologies they tried because core is slow and expensive to manufacture. The best they did for speed was called thin-film, and they sold only two systems with it, upgrades of the System 360 Model 91 supercomputer named the Model 95. They had 1 MiB of it and 4 MiB of core, sold to NASA, the first Model 91 customer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_91

Has there been an acronym shift? MEMS used to mean mechanical contrivances like dlp mirrors. Memristors are surely different?

MEMS means Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems, iow. a category of a type of sensor/actor elements that work with mechanical effects but are minuscule and often constructed using lithographic processes, not milled or the like.

Memristors are a specific electric component.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectromechanical_systems

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

While MEMS is already huge and still getting way bigger, memristors ain't really a thing yet.

Comments felt like they conflated them. Also what are all the MEMS chips in phones? Another element of the threads is they're all over phone builds. The accelerometer? The lens systems?

Most often microphones, but yes also IMUs which provide, among other things, the acceleration data. Lens system less so, at least to my knowledge.

In my experience memristors have been just about to be huge every year for the past 30