Transistors out, memristors in

Transistor technology

The invention of the transistor in 1947 laid the foundations for technological advancements that developed throughout the remainder of the 20^th and early 21^st century¹. Transistors are composed of a ‘source’ and ‘drain’ terminal, electrical charge flows between these two terminals when a certain external voltage is applied to a third, ‘gate’ terminal. You can modulate the current (rate of flow of electrical charge) between the source and drain by changing the size of the external voltage. This allows transistors to act both as on-off switches and electrical amplifiers². Transistors are everywhere (and I mean everywhere), from controlling pixels in television screens to making up logic gates (structures that perform calculations and make decisions) in computer processing chips³⁴.

Transistors are great at what they do – until it comes to Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law states that roughly every two years the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles⁵. The problem is that since breaking into the 21^st century, the downsizing of transistors has proven more and more difficult. Why? 

Because, as transistors are downsized for new devices,  changes in electronic properties occur at these smaller dimensions compared to larger materials. Essentially, electrons behave differently in smaller transistors compared to larger transistor devices⁶. This change in electron behaviour causes electrical currents to go off-track, effectively killing the transistor through “leakage currents”, as electrons flow away from their desired route⁷. 

Advancing electronics with memristors

In order to feed our ever-growing hunger for faster processing and smaller devices, chip makers are turning their attention to an allusive device; the memristor.

Memristors work just like transistors, but instead they only have two terminals: a source and a drain. Memristors don’t require an external gate terminal to control their current, instead allowing current to pass through it depending on the current that previously passed through the device (i.e. the resistance is memory dependent, hence memristor)⁸.

Memristors are considered superior devices in that they are ‘multi-state’ devices, capable of adopting states beyond the basic binary states that can be adopted by a transistor; on (1) and off (0)⁹. One memristor can replace many transistors in a computer chip, meaning they are much more powerful and data dense computing units for processing information¹⁰. 

What’s the catch?

Well, memristors are in the experimental stage¹¹¹². They do exist, but not at large scale industrial production levels. However, as transistors become more difficult to downsize, companies will funnel large amounts of time and investment into memristor research¹³. Memristors are still in their infancy, and indeed they are currently built using complicated fabrication techniques, limiting their industrial applicability¹⁴.

Transistors also won’t go down without a fight; scientists are exploring ways to adapt to the smaller dimensions currently limiting transistor downsizing. For example, constraining flowing electrons with carbon nanotubes or single molecules – preventing the electrons from flowing off-track and leaking within the device¹⁵¹⁶. For the foreseeable future, transistors will dominate our computing technologies, but with inevitable developments of the memristor – their days are surely numbered.

Edited by Frankie Macpherson

1. https://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/transist.htm
2. https://www.britannica.com/technology/transistor
3. https://www.explainthatstuff.com/logicgates.html
4. https://www.explainthatstuff.com/howtransistorswork.html
5. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/silicon-innovations/moores-law-technology.html
6. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/24/905789/were-not-prepared-for-the-end-of-moores-law/
7. https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/the-tunneling-transistor
8. https://www.nanowerk.com/memristor.php
9. https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/memory/sixstate-memristor-opens-door-to-weird-computing
10. https://www.nanowerk.com/memristor.php
11. Nature Nanotechnology, vol 14, January 2019, p 35–39, doi: https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.gla.ac.uk/10.1038/s41565-018-0302-0
12. https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/how-we-found-the-missing-memristor
13. A. Vera-Tasama, M. Gomez-Cano and J. I. Marin-Hurtado, “Memristors: A perspective and impact on the electronics industry,” 2019 Latin American Electron Devices Conference (LAEDC), Armenia, Colombia, 2019, pp. 1-4, doi: 10.1109/LAED.2019.8714735
14. https://www.technologyreview.com/2010/04/08/122213/memristor-memory-readied-for-production/
15. https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47767.wss
16. https://phys.org/news/2018-06-molecular-insulator-boundaries-current-state.html