As the 3PAR bidding war rages on, Hewlett-Packard is taking a deep breath and turning its attention to Hynix Semiconductor -- at least for a moment. On Wednesday, HP announced a joint development agreement with the memory supplier for a new circuit element.

Called memristor, the new circuit element will be integrated into a future generation of memory products -- but there is plenty of work to do to develop new materials and process integration technology that will bring memristor technology from the research phase to the commercial market. The result of the partnership is expected to yield resistive random-access memory (ReRAM).

ReRAM is nonvolatile memory with low power consumption that some industry watchers say could be the successor to flash memory in mobile phones and MP3 players. ReRAM could also serve as a universal storage medium because it can behave as flash, DRAM or even a hard drive.

Flash's Successor?

"The memristor has storage-capacity abilities many times greater than what competing technologies offer," said Dr. S.W. Park, executive vice president and CTO at Hynix. "By adopting HP's memristor technology, we can deliver new, energy-efficient products to our customers more quickly."

According to HP, memristors require less energy to operate, are faster than present solid-state storage technologies, and can retain information even when power is off. The memristor, short for "memory resistor," was postulated to be the fourth basic circuit element by Prof. Leon Chua of the University of California at Berkeley in 1971 and was first intentionally reduced to practice by researchers in HP Labs in 2006.

"When you are talking about new-generation memory technology, the opportunities are huge," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. "We are seeing memory expanding and becoming a critical element across a wide variety of IT products, including servers and storage. Enhancing memory has become an increasingly critical point of helping to ensure and improve application performance and product performance."

Don't Hold Your Breath

Earlier this year, HP announced the discovery that the memristor also can perform logic, showing that memristor-based devices could change the standard paradigm of computing by making it possible to one day perform computation in chips where data is stored, rather than on a specialized central processing unit.

"If they can come up with something that's commercially viable, it could be very revolutionary," King said. "The operational question is "if." HP seems to think that by teaming with Hynix they can produce a commercially replicable technology. At the end of the day, it comes down to price and performance, but it will be intriguing to see what they come up with."

HP and Hynix didn't offer a timeline on their expected breakthrough. Meanwhile, Hynix is still investing in NAND flash. Just three weeks ago, the company announced it has begun mass-producing 64GB NAND flash using 20nm-class technology. The chip doubles the density in a package over the current 32GB product. The company also developed a NAND flash solution that combines its 30nm-class 32GB flash chips and controller devices from partner Anobit.

x

More in Real-Time News:

New Sony E-Readers Have Touchscreens, Higher Prices... Read More >