HP Labs unveil the memristor

The memristor – short for memory resistor – is believed to enable far more energy efficient computing systems, with memories that retain information even after the power is off. The researchers also believe it may be possible to create systems with some of the pattern matching abilities of the human brain. The breakthrough was made by a team led by Stan Williams, pictured, an HP Senior Fellow and director of the Information and Quantum Systems Lab at HP Labs. “To find something new and yet so fundamental in the very mature field of electrical engineering is a big surprise,” he said. Williams and coauthors Dmitri Strukov, Gregory Snider and Duncan Stewart formulated a physics based model of a memristor and built nanoscale devices in their lab that demonstrated the necessary operating characteristics of a memristor. The memristor was first postulated in a paper published in 1971 by Professor Leon Chua, from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department of the University of California Berkeley. He argued that the memristor should be included along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor as the fourth fundamental circuit element. The memristor has properties that cannot be duplicated by any combination of the other three elements. The crucial issue for memristance is that the device’s atoms need to change location when a voltage is applied. Although researchers have observed instances of memristance for more than 50 years, proof of its existence has been harder to develop. – in part because memristance is much more noticeable in nanoscale devices. “This is an amazing development,” said Prof Chua. “It took someone like Stan Williams with a multidisciplinary background and deep insights to conceive of such a tiny memristor only a few atoms in thickness.”