What is "the original memristor hypothesis"?
What definitions of memristors would make them physically impossible?
What hypothetical benefits are so compelling about the physically possible definitions?
What definitions of memristors would make them physically impossible?
What hypothetical benefits are so compelling about the physically possible definitions?
In the 90s somebody at HP must have mentioned memristors in hearing range of their marketing department and suddenly HP was going to have a product to market in a few years.
Yeah. Never happened. Nobody's done it.
In theory, such a device could allow us to do things like build extremely low power non-volatile memory (a flash replacement, basically). A lot of marketing hype has talked about completely replacing computer RAM with non-volatile memristor-backed memory, but again, neither it nor anything like it has happened. But as it turns out, battery-backed DRAM covers a multitude of sins anyway.
The actual debate over physical possibility is because it's too low-power, to the point that an actual implementation might violate lower theoretical limits on the amount of energy required to change the state of a bit. In other words, it might violate the second law of thermodynamics, which is something of a problem.
[1] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/76097/what-a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor#Background
And I'm going to assume GP is basically referring to the first paragraph of the next session regarding definition and criticism:
According to the original 1971 definition, the memristor was the fourth fundamental circuit element, forming a non-linear relationship between electric charge and magnetic flux linkage. In 2011, Chua argued for a broader definition that included all 2-terminal non-volatile memory devices based on resistance switching.[2] Williams argued that MRAM, phase-change memory and ReRAM were memristor technologies.[21] Some researchers argued that biological structures such as blood[22] and skin[23][24] fit the definition. Others argued that the memory device under development by HP Labs and other forms of ReRAM were not memristors, but rather part of a broader class of variable-resistance systems,[25] and that a broader definition of memristor is a scientifically unjustifiable land grab that favored HP's memristor patents.[26]