nghackett@mbc.edu
Assistant Professor of Physics
BS and PhD, The University of Virginia
Dr Gergel-Hackett’s research is focused on the design, fabrication, and physics of novel materials and devices with advantages in scaling and energy for future low-power high-performance electronics. One example of a research project that she is working on is developing and studying a solution-processed, physically flexible memristor. Because this novel nanoelectronic device is fabricated using simple room-temperature spin-on techniques and is characterized via basic electrical equipment, it can be fabricated and studied in a simple lab environment with relatively minimal equipment by undergraduate students.
Although the fabrication of memristor devices is straightforward, because so little is understood about the device’s operation, studying the physics and operation of this device is exciting and has the potential to enable a wealth of discovery. The memristor is a device that has been proposed to be the fourth missing circuit element, exhibiting completely unique electrical properties associated with multi-state switching (in addition to traditional binary switching properties). It has been theorized that these memristive behaviors could lead to breakthroughs in an entirely new paradigm of computing that uses less energy and is more efficient. Because the devices can operate as switches with states in-between the traditional logical “1” and “0” states, one can envision them being operated in a similar manner as synapses in the human brain operate, where multiple electrical pathways are continuously in various in-between states of “on” and “off”. This increased complexity using single memristor devices opens the potential for an entirely new paradigm in computing that can perform drastically more complex operations with fewer components and less energy.
