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Scientists develop new technology standard that could shape the future of electronics design
In a study published in the journal Scientific Reports [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-17785-1] [DX], researchers show how they have pushed the memristor – a simpler and smaller alternative to the transistor, with the capability of altering its resistance and storing multiple memory states – to a new level of performance after experimenting with its component materials.
[...] The University of Southampton team has demonstrated a new memristor technology that can store up to 128 discernible memory states per switch, almost four times more than previously reported.
In the study, they describe how they reached this level of performance by evaluating several configurations of functional oxide materials – the core component that gives the memristor its ability to alter its resistance.
[...] Professor Prodromakis and his colleagues will be showcasing the technology, and presenting seven original research papers, at ISCAS 2018, an international circuits and systems conference, in Florence, Italy, in May.
"Almost four times more"?
(Score: 2, Informative) by flippynet on Monday January 29 2018, @11:44PM (1 child)
sorry, too late for you -- hard drives already use things like cyclic codes, and other things that i don't understand well. modern hard drive magnetic moments are so small that every spot interferes with its neighbors (ISI: inter-symbol interference). you can't achieve modern disk capacities without things like cyclic codes. physical sectors also have strong CRC checks on the media so error detection is present, but CRC errors virtually never happen on modern drives because the FEC codes are so good.
cell phones (and most other RF digital transports) do it too. i work just above the PHY layer in cellular technology; UMTS uses a constraint-9 rate-1/3 convolutional coding, which can pass an error-free packet even if HALF the transport bits are corrupt! "turbo codes" are even better. in fact the error correction is so good, when measurements indicate a decent physical channel, they intentionally "puncture" some of the transport bits just to trade error-correction capability for more throughput. in that case, they're relying on the FEC to re-inject the punctured bits on reception, because their measurements tell them the physical bit error rate is within the correction capability of the FEC.
I think this is going to happen to RAM. i think it's already happened in some types of high density flash (i.e. MLC).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @08:47AM
Oh man, this is why I come back to Soylent. Fucking fascinating. Thank you! Some amazing engineering revealing itself with just a little searching, thanks to your starting point. Wow.