Hot on the heels of the announcement earlier this week that Hynix is now an active partner in commercializing HP’s titanium-dioxide memristors, a research team at Rice University in Houston, Texas has announced that it has discovered silicon oxide structures that also exhibit memristance. The Rice team, including nanomaterials specialist Jim Tour, and a design house named PrivaTran in Austin, Texas were experimenting with a graphene-based crossbar design, looking for memristance behavior in graphene, when they observed the sought behavior in the silicon-oxide dielectric spacers placed on the graphene chip. The resulting silicon-oxide memristor exhibits nonvolatile storage, a high on/off resistance ratio (>10^5), sub-100-nsec switching time, and a write/erase endurance of 10^4 cycles. The team has published their findings in the August 31, 2010 ACS (American Chemical Society) Nanoletters Journal (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl102255r).

(As reported in EETimes -- http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4207276/Rice-s-silicon-memristor-aims-to-beat-HP -- and The New York Times -- http://www.memristor.org/news/467/scaling-memory-rice-university-hp-labs-privatran-phase-change-memory)