HP Engineers Discover Memristor

In a field as mature as electrical engineering, one rarely finds a new fundamental idea. However, rarely doesn’t mean never. In 1971 researcher Leon Chua of the University of California, Berkeley, theorized that there is, in addition to inductors, capacitors and resistors, a fourth building block which he dubbed the memory resistor, or memristor. Physicist Stanley Williams of HP Labs has just built one.

Since electrical engineering is beyond the ken of the Kensington Review, let Scientific American explain, “To an electrical engineer, the battery is a capacitor—a device for storing electric charge—and the lightbulb is a resistor—an obstacle to electric current. Until now, engineers have had only one other basic element to work with—the inductor, which turns current into a magnetic field. . . . [Dr. Chua] noticed a gap in that list. Circuit elements express relationships between pairs of the four electromagnetic quantities of charge, current, voltage and magnetic flux. Missing was a link between charge and flux. Chua dubbed this missing link the memristor and created a crude example to demonstrate its key property: it becomes more or less resistive (less or more conductive) depending on the amount of charge that had flowed through it."

The upshot of that, according to Technewsworld.com, is “Memristor-based computers, on the other hand, would be able to ‘remember’ their information after losing power and would save both power and time by not requiring the boot-up process. Such capabilities could be particularly significant as cloud computing becomes more prevalent, HP noted, since the memory and storage systems used by current cloud infrastructures require significant power to store, retrieve and protect the information of millions of Web users worldwide.”

These things are probably 10 or 20 years away from the market, if the market ever embraces them. After all, electrical engineers have been educated to think in transistors, and changing that would mark a Copernican revolution in the field. Dr. Williams gave an example of how the memristor could change research as well, “Instead of writing a computer program to simulate a brain or simulate some brain function, we’re actually looking to build some hardware based upon memristors that emulates brain-like functions.’

Electrical engineers are the best judges of precisely what this means to their field, and it will take years for the ramifications to be felt. That said, what is astonishing is the discovery of something so fundamental in an area the world had thought it understood. This is on a par with the discovery of the moons of Jupiter, the discovery of the Americas, and the discovery of the parts of the atom. Intellectually, this is the most exciting kind of event, one that restores a child-like wonder in a field where everything has to be reassessed. There is a great unknown, now, open for exploration.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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