Boise startup offers commercially available memristors?

http://www.bioinspired.net/products-1.html

by theresistor • 11 years ago

60 23 11 years ago

bioinspired.net

shadykiller• 11 years ago

What happened to the HP memristor ? Are they going to launch ever ?

Zuph3• 11 years ago

HP has put the project on indefinite hiatus. It's probably dead forever.

joshuapants• 11 years ago

I thought they just pushed that part of the project back. Didn't they announce that "the Machine" is still coming, just that first iterations will have a more traditional architecture?

tedunangst• 11 years ago

It's now... The Machine! http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/536786/machine...

The good news is they don't even need to build memristors. Even simulated memristors are faster than than memory.

"The off-the-shelf, high-powered HP server completed the task in about two seconds. The simulated Machine needed only 50 milliseconds."

deutronium• 11 years ago

Anyone know how much they cost?

Zuph3• 11 years ago

A friend emailed them for small quantity pricing a while ago.

"Thank you for contacting us. Our 16 pin package is the newest offering in our Neuro-Bit line of memristor products. Single packages are $240.00 USD each. We are offering a 5% academic discount on all of your purchases. The 16 pin dip will be available for shipping late-May and we are taking pre-orders now."

knodi123• 11 years ago

Help me out here- is that a red flag?

mangecoeur• 11 years ago

with a website like that it looks more like they should be selling "medicinal" herbs...

Untit1ed• 11 years ago

It reminds me a lot of a box for a GPU or fancy motherboard. The logo even looks exactly like he kind of one a second-tier video card manufacturer would have.

ypcx• 11 years ago

Can somebody explain what does this mean for the field of AI (short and longer term) besides (I guess) the obvious advantage of being able to implement software algorithms in hardware?

cbennett2• 11 years ago

Its not just for the AI field, if you read their About Us page you will see that a very interesting application has to do with UAV and algorithms for motion detection. The chip set design space for this is very low energy but efficient/accurate at a certain trained task, which is what makes bio-inspired applications so compelling. But going back to AI, I would say this:

Short term: a wide variety of demonstrators of various 'easy' problems, eg image and simple logic function pattern matching, in chip as opposed to in theory or software like you say. This can be done with dozens or a few hundred memristive devices.

Medium term: more interesting (my maybe not trying NP hard problems yet) application in image, sound processing and other non-linear signal processing that begin to rival best approaches coming from dozens of GPU cores. Such applications might require tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of devices. Pattern matching and classifications at this stage might rival that of a very simple brain or a small component of the neo-cortex.

Longer term: Unknown, but some possibilities when you use tens of millions of such devices may include full (neo)-cortex implementation in hardware, remember that an entirely new generation of non-linear algorithms that implement due to topological and temporal effects at the nano-scale may allow for better results than what we get given an equivalent number of transistors (yes, transistors are also nano-devices, but despite a small community working on sub-threshold switching, they are being used in an almost uniformly binary approach).

theresistor3• 11 years ago

Website is definitely underwhelming, but there's some documentation that appears reasonably detailed and plausible:

Data sheet: http://nebula.wsimg.com/35f756676bf3290bebff9c9ac0f9e3ea?Acc...

User manual: http://nebula.wsimg.com/6dba75009009af7a59036365876b3f66?Acc...

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wQviPeaNpw

theresistor3• 11 years ago

After a bit more digging, it appears to be a silver chalcogenide memristor, as described here: http://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/electrical_facpubs/73/

This is very different materially from the TiO2 based ones used in HP-derived designs, though I'm not sure what differences that will lead to in practice.

cbennett2• 11 years ago

TLDR: There is a major mismatch between the device physics of the academic group and what is being marketed/sold.

If the actual device they were selling represented what they did in this technical work, I would be very, very excited. The I/V curve looks great.

BUT, compare that figure to the I/V curve represented in the longer datasheet (linked to in parent comment). A one million fold increase in resistance in 5nS- That isn't analog at all. It could be fairly emulated as almost a flip-flop with just a few transistors!! Although a binary memristor at scale might be more interesting as a memory (eg ReRAM), at this scale meant for neuromorphic analog applications, it becomes utterly uninteresting.

So to be honest I am baffled how they went from such a promising inspiration to a completely bland packaged device. Two possibiliies come to mind: 'they' are entirely different groups, or a major mis-marketing is occurring in the interest of gaining some funds for future R&D.

yellowapple• 11 years ago

Why is there a question mark in the title? The site claims it offers memristors. No question about it.

anonbanker• 11 years ago

Since it's Boise, I'll put money on these guys being either former HP or Micron employees that probably got their memristor IP as part of their golden parachutes now that "The Machine" is gone.

tjgafron• 11 years ago

Hello Everyone. My name is Terry Gafron. I am the CEO of the company in Boise selling memristors. You all make some very good points. We are a few honest guys, trying to bring this technology to life. We do sell research grade memristors. Leon Chua has bought some from us and we are working with him to refine their characterization. While many of us are from Micron, there was no IP package from them. We developed this with a local university and are working very hard on this. We are a bare bones start-up, bootstrapping our way through this. You are correct in that there are still some discrepancies we need to resolve, but we are working on this. We have been doing contract work for DoD for the past few years, developing memristor based processors for them. We have some significant IC design experience with this sort of thing, but there is still so much that needs to be done. We sell bare bones devices we scraped up the cash to build. We do not make colossal claims. Our aim is simply to drive a stake in the sand. If you have questions, you can always send me a note at terry.gafron@bioinspired.net. Thanks all!

Boise startup offers commercially available memristors?

Related Stories