Memristor — 4th Basic Element of Circuits 291
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."
Re:To call it the forth element... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Call me old quaint (Score:3, Interesting)
Good: You're trying to recognize privacy problems.
Bad: You apparently don't understand the problem well enough to differentiate problems from non-problems.
Re:The above post explains memristors well (Score:5, Interesting)
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:What a non-article (Score:3, Interesting)
A memristor only varies the resistivity from one of the wires, which effectively isolates the two circuits. This cannot be effectively be achieved with resistors, capacitors, or inductors. So, the memristor is actually a "resistivity transistor", which happens to have memory included.
A practical application for this would be a digitally-driven analog volume control for your stereo. The + / - buttons would apply a current to change the "virtual knob"'s memory. So the next time you turn on the stereo, it'll have the same volume that it was when you turned it off. No mechanical wear and tear, and no batteries required.
Re:From the paper itself (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe a Thixotropic [wikipedia.org] 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