The reason this gets a lot of attention is that many people in the semiconductor industry have been predicting that NAND Flash—by far the most popular current form of non-volatile memory used in computers, portable music players, smartphones, and other devices—may be reaching its limits. Most NAND Flash memory shipped today is produced using 30- to 40nm processes, with the leading companies saying they can produce products at 20- to 30nm processes in the next year or so.

Some Flash memory makers, including Samsung, say they believe they can keep scaling NAND technology. Others, such as SanDisk, are talking about new technologies for increasing the numbers of bits per cell they can store. But still others in the memory industry are concerned that the technology will not scale to much smaller geometries.

As a result, a number of memory companies are working on alternatives, such as phase-change memory, which promises the ability to scale to even smaller nodes. That technology involves heat to change a material between a polycrystalline and amorphous state and back, similar to the way data is stored on a rewriteable CD. For instance, Numonyx, originally a joint venture of chipmakers Intel and ST Microelectronics and currently being acquired by Micron Technology, said it shipped phase-change memory samples in late 2008, and has said it would start shipping mass volumes of phase-change memory products this year. But we haven’t seen them yet.

Williams said HP is now in the process of transitioning the memristor technology “from lab to fab”: in other words, moving it into a manufacturing environment to create prototypes. He said it will take at least 18 months to create and iterate prototypes and then another 18 months to get ramped up to production “if everything goes perfectly.”

HP will not be doing its own manufacturing, said Williams; instead, it will be done through partnerships, the typical kind of foundry relationships. “We envision a joint development process where we and a partner work together to get all the bugs worked out and understand what the final product will look like,” Williams said.

But he said the manufacturing requires no special technology and no special materials. The first devices are likely to be manufactured using the conventional lithography of the day, and titanium dioxide is a material that has been used in every fab in the world. “Practically anyone could make this tomorrow if they had the design,” Williams said.

In about three years, on a 25nm node with four layers of devices, you could get about 20GB per square centimeter, he said, noting how the “cross-bar” structure allows for more density. “We anticipate this would be roughly double what Flash memory can deliver at the same time,” Williams said. Then noting the creation of 3nm parts in the lab, he said, “We think this technology can scale a lot farther than Flash memory can.”

Williams also said he believes memristor technology is “inherently less expensive” than other forms of memory because, it has a very simple structure that is easy to lay out. He admitted that since other technologies, such as Flash memory, are already in the marketplace, memristors will face “the problem of ramping up and getting to the volumes that would let us take advantage of economies of scale.” But he said he was feeling “pretty confident” and “anxious to see how it will play out.”