Pure Silicon Oxide ReRam Bit Cells takes on Titanium Performance?

The war of research continues its long slow climb to the future: researchers at Rice University who previously detailed their partnership with PrivaTran Inc. for fabrication of their silicon-based ReRam proof of concept memristors are putting the pressure on HP as different material studies begin to implement memristive behavior:

“Our memristors are made out of silicon instead of titanium like HPs,” explained James Tour’, a professor at Rice University. “In its patent application, HP listed many oxides, but not silicon-oxide, which we have now turned into a bit cell for resistive RAMs.” […] This phenomenon has been used by SanDisk Corp. to create write-once memories, but now Rice and PrivaTran claim to have made the process reversible, thereby enabling pure silicon ReRAMs. […] “We had noticed in our work with graphene that the silicon oxide was breaking down, but we did not understand the mechanism—now we do,” said Tour. “By applying the right voltage pulses we can cause a reversible soft breakdown in silicon oxide where oxygen atoms move out leaving a silicon filament between the source and drain electrodes, allowing current to flow—turning it into a memristor that can be used as a bit cell. [EEindia]

Of course, theres quite a way to go for these basic material problems, especially when you have to compete with tested-and-true evolutionary processing lines like the new 2.5GHz ARM cortex-a15 mpcore processors at 32nm and 28nms:

ARM today introduced the Cortex™-A15 MPCore processor that delivers a 5x performance improvement over today’s advanced smartphone processors, within a comparable energy footprint. In advanced infrastructure applications the Cortex-A15 processor running at up to 2.5GHz will enable highly scalable solutions within constantly shrinking energy, thermal and cost budgets. [ARM]