Posted on 04/30/2008 7:09:12 PM PDT by Aristotelian
CHICAGO, April 30 (Reuters) - It took about 40 years to find it, but scientists at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ.N: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Wednesday they discovered a fourth basic type of electrical circuit that could lead to a computer you never have to boot up.
The finding proves what until now had only been theory -- but could save millions from the tedium of waiting for a computer to find its "place," the researchers said.
Basic electronics theory teaches that there are three fundamental elements of a passive circuit -- resistors, capacitors and inductors.
But in the 1970s, Leon Chua of the University of California at Berkeley, theorized there should be a fourth called a memory resistor, or memristor, for short, and he worked out the mathematical equations to prove it.
Now, a team at Hewlett-Packard led by Stanley Williams has proven that 'memristance' exists. They developed a mathematical model and a physical example of a memristor, which they describe in the journal Nature.
"It's very different from any other electrical device," Williams said of his memristor in a telephone interview. "No combination of resistor, capacitor or inductor will give you that property."
Williams likens the property to water flowing through a garden hose. In a regular circuit, the water flows from more than one direction.
But in a memory resistor, the hose remembers what direction the water (or current) is flowing from, and it expands in that direction to improve the flow. If water or current flows from the other direction, the hose shrinks.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Potentially the chips will function like biological synapses making them ideal for many artificial intelligence applications. The memristor is basically an electrical resistor with memory properties. This discovery may make it possible to fashion advanced logic circuits known as filed programmable gate arrays. These are widely used for rapid prototyping of new circuits and for custom made chips that need to be created quickly.
The original memristor was written about in a a research paper done by a Berkeley electrical engineer named Leon Chua in 1971. His paper titled “Memristor - The Missing Circuit Element” argued that basic electronic theory required that in addition to the three basic elements - resistors, capacitors, and inductors - there is a fourth element that should exist, the memristor. And the HP team created working circuits based on memristors that are as small as 15 nanometers, but they believe that they will be able to make one as small as 4 nanometers.
http://www.gameshout.com/news/hewlett_packard_unveils_new_memory_technology/article10105.htm
memristor (so-called because it is part memory, part resistor)
In the limiting case you have a diode that permits current flow in one direction and not in the other. The "memristor" sounds like a "leaky" diode or a diode with a resistor in parallel to model the backward direction. I'm not convinced it is much of a "breakthrough".
All this, combined with the “dumbing down of America”, and artificial intelligence won’t need to be too smart to outsmart most of us.
Can an AI “lifeform” be far off now?
The hose analogy makes it sound more like a ‘memductor’ than a ‘memristor’.
It’s not a diode. A diode has ‘baked’ into it which direction it has lower resistance. A memristor is an easily reversible diode — a touch of current on one line, and it reverses; a touch of current on the other line, and it reverses the other way.
Sounds like a pretty new term for hysteresis.
For 20 years, we've been able to get the same transfer characteristic as in a synapse by going into the deep subthreshold domain of transistor operation.
I want to see the i, v, and t differential equations for this "menristor" thing-a-ma-doo-dad before commenting on it....
Kind of nice to see pioneer HP back at the front lines of technology.
Mark my words. This will have more impact than anything else in the next century.
But only thanks to Microsoft, which has ensured that billions of man-hours are wasted annually for computers to boot up.
How is this different than flash memory?
A simple rock will suffice.
It sounds more like a leaky flip-flop. (Although those are level-sensed and not current sensed).
I, for one, believe you are correct. A theoretical advance that has been around for 40 years before realization is a great indicator of future worth.
Consider that the description of the device was filtered through a reporter.
I sincerely doubt that a reporter could adequately describe the functioning of a capacitor or an inductor, much less a new class of device.
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