Memristor patent issued. (Eugene's #29).

Today, the United States PTO issued patent 8,530,880 Reconfigurable Multilayer Circuit (Strukov, et al.) where I'm the third inventor (this is the 29th US patent where I'm listed as a co-inventor). The patent covers a 3-D structure that uses memristor as one of its key building blocks. I described some of the ideas behind the patent in my earlier blog post and in our book Scalable Innovation, Chapter 10.

Source: Scalable Innovation, by Eugene Shteyn and Max Shtein. 2013. Fig 10.3.

At the time of the invention, Dmitry Strukov and Stanley Williams were scientists at HP Labs, working on the theory and practical configurations for the newly created memristor architecture. (Dmitry Strukov is now a professor at UC Santa Barbara). My role was to help them build HP's IP licensing portfolio, by using  advanced invention development methods. And it worked!

This particular invention enables creation of an integrated circuit configuration where (among other cool stuff) different sensing and processing functions can be packed into the same computer chip. What's really great about it is that, using memristor-specific properties, system configurations can be created dynamically, instead of building everything in the original chip. One of the long-term applications for the technology would be a combination of sensors, neural networks, and traditional computing on the same tiny device, which makes it capable of learning.

tags: invention, patent, semiconductors, electronics