8 ms·
An experimental open source memristor / programmable “diode”
- teruakohatu 6y agoThe author has a lot more info here: https://medium.com/@bigattichouse/an-experimental-open-source-memristor-programmable-diode-4476c1874d72 https://medium.com/@bigattichouse/an-experimental-open-sourc...
- dang 6y agoOK, we've changed to that from https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/kqbgnn/i_believe_ive_created_a_memristor_and_im_to_open/ https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/kqbgnn/i_belie.... Thanks!
- teruakohatu 6y agoNo worries. Thanks dang.
- Nextgrid 6y agoCan someone update the URL to the "Old" Reddit which loads much faster and has more information density: https://old.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/kqbgnn/i_believe_ive_created_a_memristor_and_im_to_open/ https://old.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/kqbgnn/i_belie... ?
- fortran77 6y agoWhy?
- elktea 6y agotry this out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
- Everlag 6y agoIf you want to avoid the 'this chrome extension has been sold to a malicious actor' fiasco that hit me with the Great Suspender yesterday, you can load this as an unpacked extension. Grab the zip from github, unzip it, and point chrome to it as an 'unpacked extension'. Works perfectly and takes 2 minutes. The github is here https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect You lose automatic update but that's a feature in this case.
- np_tedious 6y agoWhat happened with Great Suspender?
- Xavdidtheshadow 6y agoLooks like there's discussion happening here: https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1263 https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1...
- unixhero 6y agoWhoa that is heavy.
- solarkraft 6y agoDouble-"huh?" - This is a Firefox Extension - Why not just ... disable automatic updates?
- gaudat 6y agoTeddit is also worth mentioning: https://teddit.net/comments/kqbgnn/ https://teddit.net/comments/kqbgnn/
- krytz 6y agoI see HN asking all the right questions.
- SkyMarshal 6y agoYou can just change your New Reddit profile settings to get it back to the Old Reddit information density and layout. You can also make this apply across the site, overriding subreddit-specific stylesheets that subreddit mods create. I don't get why people keep complaining about New Reddit when you can just do this once and problem solved.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoBecause it's not once, it doesn't stick, and certainly not across devices.
- SkyMarshal 6y agoI suppose all that is true if you browse Reddit without logging in, as alskdj21 points out above.
- alskdj21 6y agoTo do this, you're required to log into an account which I guess a decent size of HN browse Reddit without one.
- dheera 6y agoBite me, I like the new Reddit because of dark mode and its information density is perfect for my 4K display.
- nynx 6y agoI wonder how small this could get. If it could be shrunk to fit in, say, a 0603, you could fit a million of these on a decently-small pcb. And case of those could have a billion memristors.
- dexwiz 6y agoChemistry definitely changes with scale, but that could be a good thing. This effect may be more powerful in the Nanoparticle size range, and then we can make memresistors only a few atoms thick.
- nrp 6y agoTime to be pedantic: A 0603 footprint is about 3.2mm by 1.4mm with extremely dense spacing. A two sided board with nothing but 1,000,000 0603s would be 2.24 square meters. Stacking those boards at 10mm height intervals, that would be a 10 meter tall case.
- nynx 6y agoOh, you're probably right there. Is that metric or imperial 0603? Anyhow, if it could be shrunk, presumably it could be packaged efficiently. A room sized computer, but with a billion memristors might be worth it.
- nrp 6y agoImperial. In any case, this is helps visualize how incredibly modern IC fabrication and packaging is. The biggest CPUs have up to 40 billion transistors and the biggest flash chips have 2 trillion! Following our naive 3.2mm by 1.4mm by 5mm spacing, that would be 896 and 44,800 cubic meters respectively!
- 6510 6y agoThis is a 50 000 liter tank to give an idea. https://www.directwatertanks.co.uk/50000-litre-vertical-grp-one-piece-storage-tank https://www.directwatertanks.co.uk/50000-litre-vertical-grp-... I wonder if this means it is undoable.
- tmabraham 6y agoQuite cool! This reminds me of other homemade memristor endeavours that have been presented: http://sparkbangbuzz.com/memristor/memristor.htm http://sparkbangbuzz.com/memristor/memristor.htm https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/making-a-memristor/ https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/making-a-memristor/
- krytz 6y agoThanks - much more valuable than someone bitching about using the new reddit vs the old one.
- radicalriddler 6y agoDon't worry, someone would bitch about Medium
- krytz 6y agogood point. they’ll do it about anything but discuss the idea, and mods will downvote your comment instead of those distracting everyone from the topic. probably thats why this article was first posted on reddit and not hn.
- dang 6y agoWe've banned this account for trolling. Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- biaachmonkie 6y ago"Read the rest of this story with a free account." F*#% Medium
- PaywallBuster 6y agoTry Cognito/Private navigation
- dhruvdh 6y agoTheir 5$ per month subscription is kind of a way of passing along some money to whichever article you read there that month where you think the author deserves a little something for sharing it with you. Medium was the first ever digital subscription I bought. It was great for the first 8 months or so and then for some reason my drive to read faded. Now when I open Medium the recommended articles don't attract me enough. Basically why I wrote this comment is to say maybe try Medium out, see if there are authors you don't mind "tipping".
- achn 6y agoHow is this not simply an electrolytic capacitor operating near its breakdown voltage?
- bigattichouse 6y ago(OP/Author here) In a way it is, but there's a resistor in a U shape between the two plates (so the open side of the U is our connection points, and there's a voltage gradient due to the resistor, which causes a charge/pH gradient in the electrolyte, which causes differential plating/stripping of Al on the resistor - altering the "connection point" as you run a charge through it.
- dexwiz 6y agoThis and all the examples linked elsewhere in the thread seem to be electrochemical batteries where the anode or cathode are used as a resistor in another circuit. A current is applied and a metal oxidizes. It’s pretty well known that as a metal oxidizes, it’s resistive properties will change. As most people know batteries have a limited number of cycles. Every reaction cycle adds some entropy/side reactions, and eventually it will become irreversible. Magnetic storage reorients a crystal or metal, which is more repeatable than a chemical reaction. Our neurons have similar systems to “clean” themselves so they can reset. I imagine finding a viable memresistor is more about its ability to cycle.
- krackers 6y agoRelated to this, but why do people claim that the memristor is a "fundamental" circuit element? It seems to me that it's just a generalization of a resistor where the resistance depends on the integral of the current. There are already all sorts of circuit components that have the property where the resistance is a function of X, so why is the memristor particularly deserving of its own class? Unless I'm missing something the flux-charge equation that "dPhi = M dq" seems to be the same as that of the resistor as well (since dPhi = vdt we have vdt = Mdq => v = M*i which is just ohm's law assuming a constant M).
- lmilcin 6y agoThe basic idea is that you cannot "implement" (emulate) memristance using resistors, capacitors and inductors and that is what causes it to be fundamental property of the circuit element.
- contravariant 6y agoSince memristance is just the charge-dependent flux I'm not sure you couldn't get it by just throwing a resistor capacitor and inductor into a single circuit. In fact memristance is just the voltage divided by the current, which is impossible to be 0 for any circuit with some voltage. So by this definition almost any circuit has memristance. Note that it's not unfair to consider any circuit with nonzero memristance as 'containing' a memristor, after all the whole point of fundamental circuit elements is that you can add them to model stuff like wire resistance and stray capacitance. However while you can't create resistance, capacitance and inductance by combining any of the others you can have memristance by combining all 3 (technically you can create any of the 4 by combining the 3 others, but 3 of them can be built easily so those make more sense as fundemental circuit elements). So while a linear memristor would be rather unusual, I don't quite see what's so fundamental about it as a non-linear circuit element.
- solarkraft 6y agoI fail to grasp the magnitude of this. Is this the first feasible memristor?
- tux1968 6y agoNo, it's just a DIY accessible one.
- amelius 6y agoBut is it really a memristor? The wikipedia article [1] quoted elsewhere says the memristor deals with charge and flux, whereas the article speaks of voltage and current (and some memory effect in the relation between V and I). I don't think any resistor with a memory effect should be called a memristor just like that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor#The_memristor_as_a_fundamental_electrical_component https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor#The_memristor_as_a_f...
- redis_mlc 6y agoForrest M. Mims III, the author of those little electronic design books that Radio Shack sold, actually invented a new application for LEDs, bidirectional data transfer. He ended up suing Bell Labs and winning a settlement: https://www.gunn-lee.com/Cases/ https://www.gunn-lee.com/Cases/ He also wrote the Altair 8800 user manual. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Mims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Mims
- jacquesm 6y agoIt's the memristor part that should have been in quotes in the title.
- patcon 6y agoWhenever I hear about memristors, I think back on this guy I came across online, whose company blog publishes stuff like this: https://knowm.org/thermodynamic-computing/ https://knowm.org/thermodynamic-computing/ He patented a memristor design, and seemingly has some wild ideas stemming from his work with them. > My statement stems from our work with AHaH Computing. When two energy-dissipating pathways compete for conduction resources, a Knowm synapse (aka kT-Bit) will emerge and it can be shown that the pair maximizes power dissipation while driving Hebbian or Anti-Hebbian learning. We see this building block for self-organized structures throughout Nature, for example in arteries, veins, lungs, neurons, leaves, branches, roots, lightning, rivers and mycelium networks of fungus. > > We observe that in all cases there is a particle that flows through competitive energy dissipating assemblies. The particle is either directly a carrier of free energy dissipation or else it appears to gate access, like a key to a lock, to free energy dissipation of the units in the collective. Some examples of these particles include water and sugars in plants, ATP in cells, blood in bodies, neurotrophins in neurons, and money in economies. In the cases of whirlpools, hurricanes, tornadoes and convection currents we note that although the final structure does not appear to be built of competitive structures, it is the result of a competitive process with one winner; namely, the spin or rotation. In other words, a hurricane is a ‘collapsed kT-Bit’.
- gioscarab 6y agoI have experimented a lot with memories, for now the most interesting path is to use just LEDs as 1 bit of dynamic memory. 1. Cover the LED so it cannot be hit by light 2. Charge it in reverse bias to write a 1 or do nothing to write a 0 inverting the polarity and reading the + you detect a voltage for up to 3-5 seconds depending on the diode if a 1 was written in earlier :)
- msla 6y agoThat sounds remarkably like the Williams-Kilburn tube: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube > The Williams tube works by displaying a grid of dots on a cathode ray tube (CRT). Due to the way CRTs work, this creates a small charge of static electricity over each dot. The charge at the location of each of the dots is read by a thin metal sheet just in front of the display. Since the display faded over time, it was periodically refreshed. It cycles faster than earlier acoustic delay line memory, at the speed of the electrons inside the vacuum tube, rather than at the speed of sound. However, the system was adversely affected by any nearby electrical fields, and required constant alignment to keep operational. Williams–Kilburn tubes were used primarily on high-speed computer designs.
- labcomputer 6y agoWhat is the advantage of using the parasitic capacitance of a diode instead of just using a regular capacitor in this application?