How articles like these are made:
You have people with plain old journalism degrees (if that) mixed with a self-proclaimed expertise in technology (founded on not much more thsn knowing the names of smartphones and being able to understand that two cores is twice as many as one core) spouting idiotic articles based roughly on the skimmed abstracts of scientific papers that they do not understand whatsoever. It's atrocious.
Let me do my best to explain what is actually happening here:
Resistive random-access memory (RRAM) is expected to replace flash memory (such as that in USB sticks) in a few years because it is both faster and more dense than flash memory.
Just as with any technology that is currently stuck in lab research, the issue is with scale: it's easy to create a few bits of RRAM in a clean room, but the manufacturing process is not scalable, it requires high voltages or degrades quickly, or it isn't as miniaturized/dense as what is required for it to actually work better than flash memory.
In a single "memristor" (the entity which actually holds a the smallest unit of data), you have two terminals separated by a dielectric material. If you apply a strong voltage across the dielectric material, it connects the two terminals with a conductive filament pathway that thereby lowers the resistance between the two terminals.
By measuring whether there is high or low resistance, the device can read a 0 or a 1 in that bit of memory.
The researchers from Rice University had previously used silicon oxide to serve as the dielectric material between the terminals in proof-of-concept memristors. The problem was, you needed to cut the silicon oxide layer between adjacent memristors (the silicon oxide layer couldn't just be a big flat piece, each memristor's dielectric junction needed to be separated physically from other junctions beside it), and you needed some 20 Volts to create the conductive filament pathways needed to store a value.
In their latest work, the researchers doped their silicon oxide dielectric layer to make it into a much more porous structure (like a sponge and not a slab). This made it unnecessary to cut the layer between adjacent memristors: all you have to do is take a big section of this doped silicon oxide layer, deposit "dots" of gold on top and place a big electrode on the bottom, as you can see here.
In that picture, each dot of gold on top is separated from the common platinum (Pt) electrode on the bottom by the silicon oxide. So if I apply a voltage to dot #2, this creates a conductive filament through the silicon oxide layer and connects it to the platinum layer below, storing a "1" in that address. I can do the same to dot #4, etc. Before, they had to cut the silicon oxide between each side by side dot, which is very hard to do with silicon oxide at these scales.
As a side effect of using the more porous variant of silicon oxide, they also dropped the voltage needed to create the filaments to under 2 volts, down from 20+ volts (which is great for energy consumption, and because you don't exactly want/have that kind of voltage readily available to these components). It also made the memristors last 100 times longer than the previous memristors made with the non-porous silicon oxide. This is probably because you don't have to repeatedly put 20 V across the damn thing.
The porous silicon oxide layer allows for a range of resistances to be used. That is, apply more voltage and you form a better connection through the dielectric between the terminals, leading to lower resistance. Apply less voltage and you get a weaker connection, which means larger resistance. In this case, it can potentially read a sliding scale of resistance values, allowing 9 bits to be stored in one cell.
Now, with the actual explanation aside, let's look at the wonderfully retarded statements in the Engadget article:
Its scientists have detailed a form of resistive RAM (RRAM) that can be made using regular equipment at room temperatures, making it practical for everyday gadgets.
Being able to fabricate it on "regular equipment" (i.e. a fully stocked, multi-billion dollar cleanroom) or at room temperature isn't what makes it practical.
What makes it practical is that you don't have to cut the silicon oxide layer between cells. THIS is the point of the article: that it's actually capable of being manufactured, not that it requires "regular" vs. "irregular" equipment. If the edges could be manufactured with some other "non-regular" piece of equipment, then the fabrication plants would simply add it to their process!
The trick is the use of porous silicon oxide where metals (such as gold or platinum) fill the gaps.
No. Metals don't fill the goddamn gaps. The whole point is to have the silicon oxide layer BE the gap between the gold/platinum or platinum/platinum electrodes/terminals, and to allow a conduction filament to form or be removed.
Using the silicon material doesn't just give manufacturers something familiar to work with; it requires much less power than previous techniques, can last through 100 times as many uses and isn't fazed by heat.
Ah, I didn't realize "previous techniques" didn't use a "silicon material." Also, it's not "silicon material," it's "silicon oxide." They might as well call it "oxygen material."
This whole article is awful. It's a testament to the standard to which these authors/"journalists" hold themselves: that writing a page of uninformed nonsense is an acceptable substitute for spending some time with the original source and consulting even Wikipedia to understand it. Why would someone waste their time researching like this? Because they're writing about it, for fuck's sake.
