So, to paraphrase your main argument, you're saying "Because this earlier technology didn't live up to it's promise, I doubt this newer technology will live up to its promise either". Forgive me if I take such a notion with a grain of salt, I prefer to assess each individual technology on its own merits.
Maybe I am biased; I am already working for more than 15 years in the microelectronics research and development institute
imec. Over those years I have seen several memory technologies passing by that claim to be the next universal memory, e.g. that should be able to be used both as non-volatile memory and as main RAM.
At imec there is already for a few years a project on ReRAM; I was even involved in a tape-out in this project. Only recently HP started to hype their memristors but as an insider I know there are still a lot of roadblocks to take.
The term 'holy grail' I think I also got as a description that was used in an older eejournal article on universal memory (it is a really good site and I advise anybody who is interested in the topic to follow it). I found it appropriate as you seemed to have fallen for the HP marketing/hype; but I did not in any way wanted to use it in a pejorative way to you.
However, as you brought it up, let's take a look at the challenges that memristors face to be a viable replacement for DRAM. The two main issues are:
1. Memristor-based RAM would currently be slower than DRAM.
2. Need to increase the read-write lifecycles that can be achieved with memristors before it can replace DRAM.
You forget the most important one:
3. Density and cost (both are related as major cost for memory is how much silicon area it takes). Also the yield is driving the cost. If I put billions of ReRAM how many of them won't work.
And another one:
4. Power: how much energy is needed for a write operation.
It's these latter two that will decide if ReRAM/memristors can replace DRAM or not. Solving 1 and 2 are just the condition to get enough investment money to start tackling 3 and 4.
My personal opinion is that ReRAM is a possible good candidate for the next non-volatile memory, but then only if the prediction of the scaling stop for NAND flash is finally becoming reality. I don't think it will replace DRAM.
With all that said, memristor-based RAM is off topic for what is being proposed, it's the improvements to FPGAs that matter here. I hope we can get back on topic now.
Do you know the term
'analog computer' ? I think that is a direction where you want to go with your combination of memristors + FPGA. I am no expert in those as the research topic had already mostly died out before I entered university in 1990. I think the main reason they failed is that they are too hard to program. Debugging a sequential program in a low level or high level language is already hard enough. Doing it for a chip with hundreds or thousands of analog signals is I think something that the human brain hardly can grasp or tackle.
Another thing I want to mention is that there are already NVM based FPGAs ATM not based on ReRAM but based on Flash technology.
greets,
Staf.
