More About the Marvelous Memristor

"Electronics' 'missing link' found"
BBC (May 1, 2008)

"Details of an entirely new kind of electronic device, which could make chips smaller and far more efficient, have been outlined by scientists.

"The new components, described by scientists at Hewlett-Packard, are known as "memristors"."

The BBC article includes a 1:06 video. And, a little more detail about the memristor:

"The memristors are so called because they have the ability to "remember" the amount of charge that has flowed through them after the power has been switched off."

"Professor Williams and his team have already shown that by putting two memristors together - a configuration called a crossbar latch - it could do the job of a transistor.

"'A crossbar latch has the type of functionality you want from a transistor but it's working with very different physics," he explained.

"Intriguingly, these devices can also be made much smaller than a conventional transistor."

I think that we're looking for an interesting period in technology. The memristor is new technology, and "we've never done that before" should start any time now. Maybe it already has:

" 'Even to consider an alternative to the transistor is anathema to many device engineers, and the memristor concept will have a steep slope to climb towards acceptance,' wrote Drs James Tour and Tao Heare of Rice University, Houston, in an accompanying article in Nature."

In a way, it reminds me of Mr. Fulton's Folly: the Clermont" (not the first steamboat: the first commercially successful steamboat). New technologies take time to get accepted.

Previous post on memristors: "Memristor: Cool New Technology from HP Labs" (April 30, 2008)