Until now, the world of electronics had only three passive circuit elements - the capacitor, resistor, and the inductor. While the fourth one, the memristor, was predicted and described way back, in 1971, by UC Berkeley's Leon Chua, this never went beyond the theoretical status. This week, researchers at HP Labs reported a major breakthrough, being the first ones to turn the memristor from theory to practice!


The team of researchers at HP Labs' Information and Quantum Systems Lab, led by R. Stanley Williams, published a paper in Nature magazine, in which they mentioned that, apart from coming up with a physics-based model of the memristor, the team managed to build nanoscale devices that prove to have all the required characteristics of the theoretical concept."To find something new and yet so fundamental in the mature field of electrical engineering is a big surprise, and one that has significant implications for the future of computer science. By providing a mathematical model for the physics of a memristor, HP Labs has made it possible for engineers to develop integrated circuit designs that could dramatically improve the performance and energy efficiency of PCs and data centers," said Stanley Williams.

In the future, this breakthrough may lead to completely different computers, with incredibly low power requirements and better performance, even paving the path for future computers able to "think." Anyway, I am sure we won't get to see these things happening in the next 4-5 years but, by the end of the decade, the landscape of the industry may be completely different to what we see today, and all thanks to the breakthrough made by a small team in the spring of 2008...