New circuit element devised

As all science students know, there are only three basic elements that make up an electrical circuit: the resistor, the capacitor and the inductor.

Sorry guys! It may be time to tear up your textbooks and write new ones: scientists have realised physical samples of a fourth fundamental element which they call a memristor —short for memory resistor.

In a paper published in the latest issue of Nature magazine (‘The missing memristor found’; May 1, 2008; vol no. 453; pp 80-83), researchers at Hewlett Packard Labs, U.S., report that the ‘missing’ fourth element of circuitry that Professor Leon Chua of the University of California in Berkeley predicted in 1971 is indeed realisable.

The team, led by R. Stanley Williams, believes that using nano technology one can soon build practical units of the resistor-with-memory that cannot be created by a mere combination of the three basic circuit elements.

Such elements could fuel a new class of computer memory that would ‘remember,’ even if the machine were switched off.... in other words, tomorrow’s PCs could boot up and spring to life instantly.

The engineers are busy building memristors using titanium dioxide and have already realised a few hybrid versions in silicon.

Memory banks built using memristors could be a thousand times faster than today’s magnetic disk systems, and consume a fraction of the power, the scientists suggest.