Resistor. Capcitor. Inductor. Memristor?

[agent420]

The possibilites of this are pretty cool.

1 May 2008—Anyone familiar with electronics knows the trinity of fundamental components: the resistor, the capacitor, and the inductor. In 1971, a University of California, Berkeley, engineer predicted that there should be a fourth element: a memory resistor, or memristor. But no one knew how to build one. Now, 37 years later, electronics have finally gotten small enough to reveal the secrets of that fourth element. The memristor, Hewlett-Packard researchers revealed today in the journal Nature, had been hiding in plain sight all along—within the electrical characteristics of certain nanoscale devices. They think the new element could pave the way for applications both near- and far-term, from nonvolatile RAM to realistic neural networks.

 

[Elledan]

Pretty old news, but yes, the possibilities of this technology are astounding. One could finally drop complex arrangements of capacitors and such to make (imperfect) memory cells, or variable resistors which outperform any known type.

I can't wait to see its first applications

 

[agent420]

While the theory is 30 years old, the news of actual discovery seems only 3 weeks old... Perhaps I misunderstand.

Memristor theory was formulated and named by Leon Chua in a 1971 paper. Chua strongly believed that a fourth device exists to provide conceptual symmetry with the resistor, inductor, and capacitor. He also acknowledged that other scientists had already used fixed nonlinear flux-charge relationships.[4] However, it would not be until thirty-seven years later, on April 30, 2008, that a team at HP Labs led by the scientist R. Stanley Williams would announce the discovery of a switching memristor.

 

[=ACID RAIN=]

It was theory back then and it is actually possible now.