HP develops memristor - the fourth fundamental circuit element

HP labs has finally built the fourth passive circuit element - the memristor - stands for memory resistor. If you are familiar with electronics, there are three other fundamental circuit elements - resistor, capacitor and inductor. Memristor is the fourth missing passive circuit element that has long been debated to exist but no one could provide a workable example.

Back in 1971, Berkeley Professor Leon Chua had put forth an argument that there should be a fourth passive circuit element, which he called memristor, that should connect charge and flux.

The memristor, when used in commercialized applications, will create a big impact on the way data storage technologies of today. For a layman, those days when computers would take fraction of a second to boot and power consumption would be dropped significantly, are not far away. The memristor can store data for a very long period even without electric current, this could even give us a computer some day that will be always on or something like that. It can even shrink the space that’s required to store a vast amount of data today by several folds.

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