Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Resistors, Inductors, Capacitors... Memristors?

It seems HP Labs has brought to fruition the physical realisation of an additional, theoretically predicted, fundamental circuit element: the memristor. Originally described in Chua, 1971, numerous sources are claiming that HP has produced a 'practical' (for some value of practical) physical incarnation of the predicted device. ("The Missing Memristor Found" abstract)

My understanding is that the memristor functions as a time-varying resistor whose resistance varies depending on the history of its voltage. What will the consequences be? So far there is a lot of talk about practical applications including persistent memory and faster pattern recognition... I want to hear about the (presently) impractical applications.

"Building an analog computer in which you don't use 1s and 0s and instead use essentially all shades of gray in between is one of the things we're already working on," says Williams. -- Wired, Scientists Create First Memristor, April 30th, 2008
Next thing... a neural interface?

1 comment:

Rachael said...

Tachikomas ho! ?