The rumor at the recent Flash Memory Summit held earlier this month was that HP was about to announce an agreement with a commercial semiconductor vendor to take the fabled memristor, heretofore an almost mythical memory element seen only by researchers within HP Labs, into production. The rumor got the announcement date and the vendor wrong, but it was essentially true. Today, HP and Hynix announced that they will jointly bring the memristor to the market as a commercial memory device. HP had previously announced experimental memristors with 1 nsec cycle times using 3nm (!) design rules. Even with those early experimental specs, the memristor looks mighty tempting as a potential heir to the DRAM throne. Couple in the memristor’s nonvolatility and you have a category killer.

Memristor memory from HP and Hynix now sports the moniker ReRAM for Resistive Random Access Memory. HP and Hynix will jointly develop new materials and process integration technology to transfer HP’s memristor technology from research to commercial development. Hynix will then implement the memristor technology in its R&D fab.