Memristor - The Fourth Passive Circuit Element revealed

Memristor (Short for Memory Resistor)is all over the news today...Yesss the missing fourth fundamental passive circuit element has been discovered at last ! This is in no boubt a real big achievement.. and is something really new in the fundamental electronics.

Well, theorotically Memristor isnt anything new. It has existed in theory for last 37 years, But it is now, today that it has been discovered by four researchers at HP Labs’ Information and Quantum Systems Lab, led by R. Stanley Williams. In a paper published in today’s edition of Nature, researchers at HP Labs presented the mathematical model and a physical example of a 'memristor' – a blend of memory and resistor – which has the unique property of retaining a history of the information it has acquired.

And this can mean big implications ! One application for this research could be the development of a new kind of computer memory that would supplement and eventually replace today’s commonly used dynamic random access memory (DRAM). Computers using conventional DRAM lack the ability to retain information once they lose power. When power is restored to a DRAM-based computer, a slow, energy-consuming 'boot-up' process is necessary to retrieve data from a magnetic disk required to run the system. “A memory based on memristors could be 1000 times faster than magnetic disks and use much less power,” Williams says.

A memristor is essentially a resistor with memory. The actual resistance of the memristor changes depending on the amount of voltage and the time for which that voltage has been applied to the device. The IEEE Spectrum article has much more profound article on this and as is EETimes article. trust me, both are a must read!

And as IEEE Kirchoff Award winner Leon Chua( He was the one who predicted the existence of memristors) says about this discovery "now all the EE textbooks need to be changed" !!!