This week HP announced a new discovery with "Memristor" (memory resistor) finding that it has more capabilities than previously expected.
Technically speaking, a Memristor is essentially a fourth type of electrical circuit that joins the resistor, the capacitor and the inductor, maintaining a relationship between the time integrals of current and voltage. But what does this mean in non-technical terms?
There has been much discussion and research about whether Memristor actually exists since its existence was theorised the 1970s by Leon Chua, a professor of electrical engineering. In 2008 HP Labs proved the existence of Memristor - the end result being that it would be possible to develop computers that turn on and off like a regular household light.
It would also enable far more energy efficient computing because the Memristor would be able to retain information even whe power is off, unlike the commonly used DRAM of today. In systems today the existence of DRAM requires an energy intensive bootup process - with Memristor as a replacement, going to get a coffee while you waited for your computer to bootup would be a thing of the past.
Stanley Williams, senior fellow and director of Information and Quantum Systems Lab at HP, said "Memristive devices could change the standard paradigm of computing by enabling calculations to be performed in the chips where data is stored rather than in a specialized central processing unit. Thus, we anticipate the ability to make more compact and power-efficient computing systems well into the future, even after it is no longer possible to make transistors smaller via the traditional Moore's Law approach."
On 10 April 2010, HP has confirmed they succeeded in creating "development-ready architectures" for Memristor-based memory chips, allowing them in the future to develop handheld devices that will allow ten times more embedded memory than is available today because they allow at least twice as much data to be stored in the same area. HP expect within five years the contraints of Moores Law will be surpassed and that computers would be treading down the path of more human-like characteristics such as pattern association because of this discovery.
