New element for electronic circuits‏

For nearly 40 years, scientists have speculated that basic electrical circuits have a natural ability to remember things even when the power is switched off. But, they just couldn't find it. Now, researchers at Hewlett-Packard (HP) have proven them right.

HP today announced that researchers from HP Labs, the company's central research facility, have proven the existence of what had previously been only theorized as the fourth fundamental circuit element in electrical engineering.

The newly discovered circuit element — called a memristor — could enable cell phones that can go weeks or longer without a charge, PCs that start up instantly, and laptops that retain your session information long after the battery dies.

Memristors -- the fourth passive component type after resistors, capacitors and inductors -- were first postulated in a seminal 1971 paper in the IEEE Transactions on Circuit Theory by professor Leon Chua at the University of California (Berkeley), but their first realization was just announced today by HP.

This scientific advancement could make it possible to develop computer systems that have memories that do not forget, do not need to be booted up, consume far less power and associate information in a manner similar to that of the human brain.

According to HP Labs Senior Fellow R. Stanley Williams and Chua, now virtually every electronics textbook will have to be revised to include the memristor and the new paradigm it represents for electronic circuit theory.

The memristor is a radically different approach from another type of solid state storage called phase-change memory that is being pursued by I.B.M., Intel and other companies. Memristor-based memory and storage has the potential to lower power consumption and provide greater resiliency and reliability in the face of power interruptions to a data center.

"Electronic theorists have been using the wrong pair of variables all these years -- voltage and charge. The missing part of electronic theory was that the fundamental pair of variables is flux and charge," said Chua. "The situation is analogous to what is called "Aristotle's Law of Motion, which was wrong, because he said that force must be proportional to velocity.

That misled people for 2000 years until Newton came along and pointed out that Aristotle was using the wrong variables. Newton said that force is proportional to acceleration -- the change in velocity. This is exactly the situation with electronic circuit theory today. All electronic engineering text books have been teaching using the wrong variables -- voltage and charge--explaining away inaccuracies as anomalies. What they should have been teaching is the relationship between changes in voltage, or flux, and charge."

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