The Future of Memristive Technologies

Project ID: 2228cd1293 (You will need this ID for your application)

Research Theme: Advanced Materials

UCL Lead department: Electronic and Electrical Engineering (EEE)

Department Website

Lead Supervisor: Adnan Mehonic

Project Summary:

Modern computing systems exhibit high energy consumption, posing a significant societal challenge. Powerful computing mechanisms are essential across a range of data-driven technologies, including AI, IoT, medicine, security, and health tracking. One primary technological obstacle that hinders many real-world applications, especially in energy-constrained settings, is the memory bottleneck. This pertains to the difficulty of efficiently accelerating data transfer between the processor and memory.

This research project is poised to tackle this challenge by leading the development of novel memristor devices. These memristors will:

(a) Be embeddable in advanced processing nodes below 20nm – an accomplishment that current nonvolatile memories, such as Flash, find challenging, particularly when integrating into chips fabricated with nodes smaller than 40/28nm. (b) Deliver performance metrics that surpass NOR Flash by over 100 times in areas like speed and energy efficiency. (c) Develop innovative analogue and neuromorphic processing, heralding a revolution in low-power computing for edge technologies. More fundamentally, developed memristors will enable novel analogue and neuromorphic processing to transform low power computing in edge technologies.