Memristor

Some clever fellas over at HP have developed a new kind of memory circuit, one that was prophesied nearly four decades ago:

Thirty-seven years ago, Leon Chua, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, mathematically theorized that scientific symmetry demands that there should be a fourth fundamental circuit. Engineers were already familiar with resistors (which resist the flow of electricity), capacitors (which store electricity), and inductors (which resist changes to the flow of electrical current), which can be combined to build more complex devices. The fourth circuit, which Chua called a "memristor" for memory resistor, would register how much current had passed.

"He looked at fundamental circuit equations and noticed there was a hole," said Stan Williams, who heads up the Information and Quantum Systems lab at HP Labs, "There should be a device that remembers how much current flowed through a device."

Williams and other scientists at Hewlett-Packard are publishing a paper in Nature on Wednesday demonstrating that that these things actually exist. HP has a few discrete memristors as well as a silicon chip embedded with memristors. It's a first, according to HP.

The bottom line: Exponentially higher data density at lower power levels.

I just finished a new build with four gig of the fastest-bestest RAM in it, and already it's out of date. You gotta love technology.