Memristor Crossbars as Easy as Raspberry Pi | Hacker News Reader

Memristor Crossbars as Easy as Raspberry Pi

knowm.org

35 pointsdfischer6 comments

For those like me who knew nothing about "memristors":

> A memristor (/ˈmɛmrɪstər/; a portmanteau of memory resistor) is a non-linear two-terminal electrical component relating electric charge and magnetic flux linkage.

> Memristors can potentially be fashioned into non-volatile solid-state memory, which could allow greater data density than hard drives with access times similar to DRAM, replacing both components.

> Memristor have applications in programmable logic, signal processing, Super-resolution imaging, physical neural networks, control systems, reconfigurable computing, brain-computer interfaces, and RFID.

> In 2009, a simple electronic circuit consisting of an LC network and a memristor was used to model experiments on adaptive behavior of unicellular organisms.

> It was shown that subjected to a train of periodic pulses, the circuit learns and anticipates the next pulse similar to the behavior of slime molds Physarum polycephalum where the viscosity of channels in the cytoplasm responds to periodic environment changes. Applications of such circuits may include, e.g., pattern recognition.

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

Unfortunately, the money, time, and research and development of NAND gates far exceeds memristors in conceivable aspect. People talk about how memristors will revolutionize the industry. But year after year people keep on using NAND flash and NAND based technologies. NAND is king and memristors are not going to change that any time soon.

Summary: HAT[1] for Raspberry Pi that attaches to the GPIO pins, that gives you access to a daughterboard with 16 memristors. Appears to be designed purely for hardware users to explore memristor electrical properties.

What appears to be a PCI swappable connector is a nice touch.

Price tag $180.

I can't say I buy the neural network hype in the rest of the article, but whatever floats your boat.

[1]I believe this has been backronymed to "Hardware Attached on Top"

The smallest daughterboard mentioned has 3072 memristors.

Could someone with more background in these electrical devices shed some light? This looks really cool, but I'm a little confused. Looks like this is very new tech?

It is quite new. Seems like it's just barley on the line of accessible to the hacker/maker outside of the heavy researcher type.

It seems quite interesting actually. I've been thinking about analog computation for a while and this is an intersection of ideas that can be pretty profound if it takes off.

I'm motivated to understand more and be able to play with it. Hello world seems to be an image classifier, ha.

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