Memristor — 4th Basic Element of Circuits

esocid writes "Researchers at HP Labs have solved a decades-old mystery by proving the existence of a fourth basic element in integrated circuits that could make it possible to develop computers that turn on and off like an electric light. The memristor — short for memory resistor — could make it possible to develop far more energy-efficient computing systems with memories that retain information even after the power is off, so there's no wait for the system to boot up after turning the computer on. It may even be possible to create systems with some of the pattern-matching abilities of the human brain. Leon Chua, a distinguished faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley, initially theorized about and named the element in an academic paper published 37 years ago. Chua argued that the memristor was the fourth fundamental circuit element, along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor, and that it had properties that could not be duplicated by any combination of the other three elements."

Comments

Re:The above post explains memristors well

[A beautiful mind]

Exactly! After reading the few articles, wikipedia and the available information from HP, it looks more like a generational change in technology rather than just a new kind of memory. I think the Nature article's wording of discovery is correct here, this looks like an interesting piece of base research with large real world applications, instead of a specific invention to store things.

Given that this memristor looks like to be using very little power, can be scaled down very well and can be used both as storage and to build transistors - I'm pretty excited about this. Yeah, there are other attempts at non-volatile ram, but they are either slow (flash), cannot be written to many times (flash), expensive (a lot of flash alternatives) or just simply too energy consuming, the memristors should bring in some nice competition into the field, since the articles specifically state that it doesn't generate much heat at all, compared to currently existing other technologies, it can be made to change state faster than they could measure(!) in the lab and it can be repeated many times. So, the only part that is left is whether it is economically feasible to mass-produce these. I'm guessing it shouldn't be a very large problem either given the relative simplicity of this discovery.

Re:From the paper itself

[Orne]

Is there an equivalent memristor for the mechanical world, e.g. mass, spring, dashpot, xxx?

Maybe a Thixotropic object like the viscocity of ketchup? It is an object that changes its resistance to flow over time with repect to the force of the flow that was previously applied.

The more force you apply to ketchup, the easier it is to pour. A memristor would be like the more electric flux you apply through the area of the device, the more/less resistance current will flow through the device.

-- Scott