MEMRISTOR- A groundbreaking breakthrough in fundamental electronics!!

The missing-link in electronics,the memristor, that was proposed to exist 37 years ago by a man with a vision, Dr.Leon Chua, was experimentally proven to exist this april 30th, at the HP labs by a team of scientists under R.Stanley Williams.

Memristor, the fourth passive component type after-resistor, capacitor, and inductor- it "remembers" changes in the current passing through it by changing its resistance. Now HP claims to have discovered the first instance of a memristor, which it created with a bi-level titanium dioxide thin-film that changes its resistance when current passes through it.

"This new circuit element solves many problems with circuitry today--since it improves in performance as you scale it down to smaller and smaller sizes," said Chua. "Memristors will enable very small nanoscale devices to be made without generating all the excess heat that scaling down transistors is causing today.

HP has already tested the material in its ultra-high-density crossbar switches, which use nanowires to pack a record 100 Gbits onto a single die--compared with 16 Gbits for the highest density flash memory chips extant.

Why is MEMRISTOR a breakthrough? Because this element, allows data to be stored in circuitry even after the power is switched off.so... well that will probably get you a PC that switches ON and OFF like... eh ..say a BULB!! if that doesn't catch your imagination.... what about a computer that downright simulates human thought..by actually copying our neural pattern. just a few of the possible applications for the FOURTH BASIC ELEMENT IN FUNDAMENTAL ELECTRONICS!.

Memristor theory was formulated and named by Leon Chua in a 1971 paper, Chua strongly believed that a fourth device existed to provide conceptual symmetry with the resistor, inductor, and capacitor. A device linking charge and flux (themselves defined as time integrals of current and voltage), which would be the memristor.

This invention has been already called a major breakthrough in the electronic world. It has a huge potential in electronics, meaning that no RAM will be needed - the memory will be a part of the circuitry rather than a separate module; this will save valuable space and it can give new possibilities and advantages!While memory modules will no longer be needed, all saved space can be used to make devices more compact and powerful. In addition, the potential energy savings, offered by using such elements as memristors, will dramatically improve battery life of portable devices.

HP labs were quoted as saying ""We are already designing new types of circuits in both the digital and analog domains using our crossbar architecture. In the analog domain, we want to build memristor-based devices that operate in a manner similar to how the synapse works in the brain--neuron-like analog computational elements that could perform control functions where decisions must be made involving comparisons as to whether something is larger or smaller than something else. We are not building a neural network yet, but we think that using the memristor in its analog mode with our crossbar is a pretty good representation of a neural net."