7
Device-Centric Software
7.1 Battery Drain – The Memristor as One Solution
The last six chapters have looked at how user hardware influences network value and user value. The end point in the last chapter was smart televisions and 3D-capable high-end lap tops.
If it was just one application being supported at any one time then life would be reasonably simple but in practice there is a user expectation that the device and the network to which it is connected should be capable of supporting multiple tasks simultaneously.
An example would be a lap top or tablet user texting or sending e mails while watching a video on You Tube with a Skype session going on in the background. Then the phone rings. At this point the weakest point will cause some form of instability that will become noticeable to the user. This might be caused by a processor bandwidth limitation, a memory bandwidth limitation, an interconnect limitation, a network bandwidth limitation or an energy bandwidth limitation (the battery goes flat). For example, the lap-top user forums referenced in the last chapter are mainly focused on how to disable functionality to reduce battery drain, which rather defeats the point of the product.
There are potential solutions, one of which is the memristor.
The theory of resistance with memory was put forward in 1971 in a paper1 by Professor Leon Chua, from the University of California Berkeley and was premised on the basis that circuit design has three elements, a resistor, capacitor ...
