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This week computer manufacturer HP announced it is teaming up with chip-maker Hynix to bring the first memristors, or memory resistors, to market within three years. Able to store information even without a source of power, memristors have been hailed as a way to keep up with Moore’s Law.

Moore’s Law is that old adage, first uttered by Intel’s Gordon Moore in the 1960s, that the number of transistors one could fit on an integrated circuit should double every couple years or so.

But industry consensus had shifted in recent years to a widespread belief that the end of physical progress in shrinking the size modern semiconductors was imminent. Chip makers are now confronted by such severe physical and financial challenges that they are spending $4 billion or more for each new advanced chip-making factory. [The New York Times]

Thus the excitement over memristors, one of the tech tricks that has the potential to meet or exceed today’s chip capacity. The idea for them was first proposed nearly four decades ago, but it was just two years ago that computer scientists made memristors a reality. Earlier this year, as DISCOVER covered, a team of some of the same HP researchers showed in a Nature study that memristors could act as both computer and memory.

Memristors haven’t yet been developed to the point where they can take the place of transistors, so they don’t fit the standard definition for Moore’s Law acceleration. But they can make more efficient use of standard silicon-based processors and could eventually take over the processing job as well. [MSNBC]

HP’s Stan Williams says that Moore’s Law may be due for an upgrade of its own. As the way engineers build computers changes, he says, so must the law.

“Moore’s Law in itself has evolved and morphed in time,” HP’s Williams [said]. “It used to be the number of transistors in a chip, but now it means exponential growth in capability on a chip…. I personally don’t see any need for this exponential increase in capability to end within the next few decades.” [MSNBC]

A wholly different idea to keep up with Moore came out of Rice University this week. While we hear all the time about graphene—flat sheets of pure carbon—as the material of the future, researchers in Jim Tour’s lab discovered something remarkable about the material of the present: silicon.

Under certain conditions, an electric charge applied to tiny bits of silicon dioxide will repeatedly break and reconnect its crystals. The breaks in the crystal can be used to store information. This kind of phenomenon was noticed in the 1960s, but because it occurs on such a small scale — the nanocrystal wires are about 5 billionths of a meter wide — those researchers couldn’t effectively manipulate it, Tour said. Now, as the science of nanotechnology matures, scientists are beginning to control the interactions of handfuls of electrons. [Houston Chronicle]

Tour already is talking to Texas companies about developing memory chips based on the silicon-based 3D storage his lab created.

There are other promising tech candidates for keeping up with Moore’s Law: Check out some of the brightest ideas in this DISCOVER gallery.

Image: Stan Williams / Nature

Source: Coming Soon to Save Moore’s Law: Memristors

Faith Singer at TACC writes “The term ‘supercomputing’ usually evokes images of large, expensive computer systems that calculate unfathomable algorithms and run on enough energy to support a small city. Now, imagine a supercomputer, but run on the electrical equivalent of three standard-size coffee-makers. This year’s international supercomputing conference, SC10, will feature the Student Cluster Competition that challenges students to build, maintain, and run the most-cutting edge, commercially available high-performance computing (HPC) architectures on just 26 amps of energy.”

Source: Low Energy Supercomputing

An anonymous reader writes “Two years ago, Spanair flight JK-5022 crashed shortly after takeoff in Madrid, killing 154 of its 172 passengers and crew. El Pais online newspaper reports that the ground computer responsible for triggering an alarm after three failures are reported in a plane failed to do so. The computer was infected with trojans (Google translation of Spanish original).”

Source: Trojan-Infected Computer Linked To 2008 Spanair Crash

Several readers have noted that
Intel has agreed to buy McAfee, the computer antivirus software maker, for about $7.7 billion in cash. There is also a press release available if you are into that sort of thing.

Source: Intel Buys McAfee

A few years ago we reported that it had been proven that Rubik’s Cubes could be solved in 23 moves. Well now that number is
down to just 20. Proving it required 35 years of computer time donated by Google to get it done.

Source: Rubik’s Cube Now Solvable in 20 Moves

NotBornYesterday was one of many readers sending in news that the Indian government has announced it is helping to develop a $35 tablet computer running Linux. “India has unveiled the prototype of a $35 basic touchscreen tablet aimed at students, which it hopes to bring into production by 2011. The government plans to subsidize the tablets so the cost to students could be $20; and eventually, they hope the cost will fall to $10 per unit. India’s human resource development minister Kapil Sibal says: ‘The motherboard, its chip, the processing, connectivity, all of them cumulatively cost around $35, including memory, display, everything.’ Using a memory card instead of a hard drive, and running a Linux OS, the designers have managed to keep the price low, and are now looking for manufacturing partners. The tablet can be used for functions like word processing, Web browsing, and video conferencing. It has a solar power option too, which is important in India’s less developed areas, though that add-on costs extra.”

Source: India’s $35 Tablet Computer

Though the wing-flapping contraptions of early human flight haven’t quite caught on, researchers think birds may still have something to teach us about navigating the air: how to land.  MIT researchers have made a system that can bring a modified glider to an elegant bird-like stop, causing it to set down on its tail.

Russ Tedrake of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and his student Rick Cory developed the computer model to bring a basic foam glider to a unique landing. The principle behind the plane’s stop is the same one used by stunt planes–stall. When its wings tilt back, the plane loses lift and falls from the sky. Traditional planes don’t use this method to land because the airflow is chaotic (see smoke visualization above) making it hard to predict how the plane will behave.

Birds come to a stop by tilting their wings back at sharp angles. This creates turbulence and large, unpredictable whirlwinds behind the wings. If an airplane pointed its wings up in this way, it would lose lift and fall out of the sky. But MIT researchers wanted to take advantage of stall–specifically, post-stall drag–to help a plane come to a controlled landing. [Popular Science]

Video after the break.

Tedrake and Cory developed a computer program to control the glider with a steering motor attached to its tail. The program predetermined the best flight paths to bring the glider to a safe landing, and also how to correct or switch courses if it veered too far off the path.

For a range of launch conditions, they used the model to calculate sequences of instructions intended to guide the glider to its perch. . . . Cory and Tedrake also developed a set of error-correction controls that could nudge the glider back onto its trajectory when location sensors determined that it had deviated from it. [MIT]

They launched the 90-gram craft from 12 feet away from its landing wire, in winds between 13 and 19 miles per hour. Though they don’t predict a passenger plane landing like this anytime soon, they think the technique might prove useful for flying robots that could perch and recharge their batteries on a power line. With more research, they might also make craft that use other bird strategies.

The researchers say they are continuing the research and will next be moving outside into real-world conditions. They also plan to explore the use of flapping wing vehicles as well as more typical propeller driven aircraft. [Wired]

Image: Courtesy of Jason Dorfman (MIT/CSAIL).
Video courtesy of Russ Tedrake and Rick Cory

Source: Experimental Glider Flies Like a Plane, Lands Like a Bird

An anonymous reader writes “Computer maker Dell is warning that some of its server motherboards have been delivered to customers carrying an unwanted extra: computer malware. It could be confirmation that the ‘hardware trojans’ long posited by some security experts are indeed a real threat.”

Source: Dell Ships Infected Motherboards

Captain Eloquence writes “The next major version of Adobe’s PDF Reader will feature new sandboxing technology aimed at curbing a surge in malicious hacker attacks. The initial sandbox implementation will isolate all ‘write’ calls on Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2003. Adobe security chief Brad Arkin believes this will mitigate the risk of exploits seeking to install malware on the user’s computer or otherwise change the computer’s file system or registry. In a future dot-release, the company plans to extend the sandbox to include read-only activities to protect against attackers seeking to read sensitive information from the user’s computer.”

Source: Adobe Putting PDF Reader In a Sandbox

An anonymous reader writes “US security officials say the country’s cyberdefenses are not up to the challenge. In part, it’s due to a severe shortage of computer security specialists and engineers with the skills and knowledge necessary to do battle against would-be adversaries. The protection of US computer systems essentially requires an army of cyberwarriors, but the recruitment of that force is suffering. ‘We don’t have sufficiently bright people moving into this field to support those national security objectives as we move forward in time,’ says James Gosler, a veteran cybersecurity specialist who has worked at the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the Energy Department.”

Source: Cyberwarrior Shortage Threatens US Security