Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Intellectual Property Law Blogs -> TinytechIP

Intellectual Property Law

: TinytechIP

USPTO Orders Reexamination of HP's Memristor Patent

The "memristor" has attracted a lot of attention in recent years as a new nanoscale circuit element having properties similar to neural synapses and which is a contender for a new form of non-volatile memory called RRAM. The origins of the memristor go back to a theoretical concept developed by UC Berkeley professor Leon Chua in the 1970s but which lacked a physical material example. In 2008, researchers from HPLabs reported in the journal Nature a solid state version of the memristor capable of being integrated into CMOS electronics processing.

However, it turns out that the material described by HPLabs in the Nature paper (based on a bilayer of oxygen depleted TiO2) was actually patented by researchers from Samsung and not HP. More recently, the one patent that Hewlett-Packard does hold related to the memristor has been ordered for reexamination (Control # 90/009,633) by the USPTO based on earlier work by researchers at the University of Houston. This is bad news for Hewlett-Packard but may be good news for competing companies such as Adesto Technologies, Numonyx (backed by Samsung), and Unity Semiconductor which are developing alternative materials for RRAM and phase change memory products.

Full post as published by TinytechIP on February 03, 2010 (boomark / email).