Past events

Memristive Memories: a journey interlinking biology with nanotechnologies

An Inaugural lecture by: Professor Themis Prodromakis, Professor of Nanotechnology at the University of Southampton

Abstract

In the not so distant future, electronic devices will be everywhere – embedded within our physical world and even in our bodies – empowering modern societies with unprecedented capabilities. Yet, the technological progress that brought us the mobile revolution will allow us to reach this point.

Up until now, the processing of data in electronics has relied on assemblies of vast numbers of transistors – microscopic switches that control the flow of electrical current by turning it on or off. Transistors have got smaller and smaller in order to meet the increasing demands of technology, but have nowadays reached their physical limit, with – for example – the processing chips that power smartphones containing an average of five billion transistors that are only a few atoms wide.

A novel nano-electronic technology, known as the memristor, proclaims to hold the key to a new era in electronics, being both smaller and simpler in form than transistors, low-energy, and with the ability to retain data by ‘remembering’ the amount of charge that has passed through them – akin to the behaviour of synaptic connections in the human brain.

In his lecture Themis Prodromakis will chart his career in this exciting field, from the time of his postgraduate research, to his latest work where single nanoscale devices can be used for bringing bio-inspired concepts to life, and the people and problems he has encountered along the way.

Biography

Prof Themis Prodromakis received his BEng. (2003) from University of Lincoln, MSc. (2004) from University of Liverpool and Ph.D. (2008) from Imperial College London. He previously held a Corrigan Fellowship in Nanoscale Technology and Science, funded by the Corrigan Foundation and LSI Inc., within Imperial College and a Lindemann Trust Visiting Fellowship in EECS UC Berkeley. Since 2013, he has been with the University of Southampton, where he is currently Professor in Nanotechnology and Royal Society Industry Fellow and leads the Electronic Materials & Devices Group within the Zepler Institute for Photonics and Nanoelectronics