Rice University reports that silicon oxide also good for memristors

Hot on the heels of the announcement earlier this week that Hynix is now an active partner in commercializing HP’s titanium-dioxide memristors, a research team at Rice University in Houston, Texas has announced that it has discovered silicon oxide structures that also exhibit memristance. The Rice team, including nanomaterials specialist Jim Tour, and a design house named PrivaTran in Austin, Texas were experimenting with a graphene-based crossbar design, looking for memristance behavior in graphene, when they observed the sought behavior in the silicon-oxide dielectric spacers placed on the graphene chip. The resulting silicon-oxide memristor exhibits nonvolatile storage, a high on/off resistance ratio (>10^5), sub-100-nsec switching time, and a write/erase endurance of 10^4 cycles. The team has published their findings in the August 31, 2010 ACS (American Chemical Society) Nanoletters Journal (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl102255r).


(As reported in EETimes -- http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4207276/Rice-s-silicon-memristor-aims-to-beat-HP -- and The New York Times -- http://www.memristor.org/news/467/scaling-memory-rice-university-hp-labs-privatran-phase-change-memory)