Keynote speaker 1: Computer Evolution over the next decade: Fact or fiction?

Computers evolve fast and the processing power should double every two years by Moore´s Law. That would mean computers 10 years from now would be 32 times more powerful than the current models. In 2005, Moore said that as transistors reach the atomic scale we may encounter fundamental barrier we can´t cross. We may get around that barrier by building a computer that works similarly to the human brain. However, most of previous efforts to build brain-like computers have failed because it took about the same silicon area to emulate a CMOS synapse as that needed to emulate a neuron. In theory, any realistic implementation of a synapse should ideally be at least four orders of magnitude smaller than that required to build a neuron. The invention of the memristor opens a new way to implement synapses. A memristor is a simple 2-terminal element, which means a vast number of memristors could be integrated together with other CMOS elements, in a single chip.