Memristor- A new component for electrical circuits
Electrical circuits have three major components– resistors, capacitors, and inductors. A fourth possibility has been known to exist in theory since it was proposed in 1971 by UC Berkeley electrical engineering professor Leon Chua. The fourth possible component is a type of variable resistor that Chua dubbed the “memristor”. The concept languished as a theoretical idea with no real world implementation until recently when HP scientists found a method to construct a device with the function of a memristor. Ars Technica reports:
Last year, scientists at Hewlett-Packard (HP) demonstrated the first functional solid-state memristor, made from thin films of TiO2, and discovered it had an abundance of unique and highly promising properties.
Writing at IEEE Spectrum, HP scientist R. Stanley Williams describes the implications of the new component:
Combined with transistors in a hybrid chip, memristors could radically improve the performance of digital circuits without shrinking transistors. Using transistors more efficiently could in turn give us another decade, at least, of Moore’s Law performance improvement, without requiring the costly and increasingly difficult doublings of transistor density on chips. In the end, memristors might even become the cornerstone of new analog circuits that compute using an architecture much like that of the brain.
Here’s a short description of how a memristor works:
Memristor is a contraction of “memory resistor,” because that is exactly its function: to remember its history. A memristor is a two-terminal device whose resistance depends on the magnitude and polarity of the voltage applied to it and the length of time that voltage has been applied. When you turn off the voltage, the memristor remembers its most recent resistance until the next time you turn it on, whether that happens a day later or a year later.
And what are the possible uses of the new component?
The ability to indefinitely store resistance values means that a memristor can be used as a nonvolatile memory. That might not sound like very much, but go ahead and pop the battery out of your laptop, right now—no saving, no quitting, nothing. You’d lose your work, of course. But if your laptop were built using a memory based on memristors, when you popped the battery back in, your screen would return to life with everything exactly as you left it: no lengthy reboot, no half-dozen auto-recovered files.
But the memristor’s potential goes far beyond instant-on computers to embrace one of the grandest technology challenges: mimicking the functions of a brain. Within a decade, memristors could let us emulate, instead of merely simulate, networks of neurons and synapses.
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