Memristor, a very important breakthrough in Computer technology.

[Keravnos]

EVER had the feeling something is missing? If so, you're in good company. Dmitri Mendeleev did in 1869 when he noticed four gaps in his periodic table. They turned out to be the undiscovered elements scandium, gallium, technetium and germanium. Paul Dirac did in 1929 when he looked deep into the quantum-mechanical equation he had formulated to describe the electron. Besides the electron, he saw something else that looked rather like it, but different. It was only in 1932, when the electron's antimatter sibling, the positron, was sighted in cosmic rays that such a thing was found to exist.
In 1971, Leon Chua had that feeling. A young electronics engineer with a penchant for mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, he was fascinated by the fact that electronics had no rigorous mathematical foundation. So like any diligent scientist, he set about trying to derive one.
And he found something missing: a fourth basic circuit element besides the standard trio of resistor, capacitor and inductor. Chua dubbed it the "memristor". The only problem was that as far as Chua or anyone else could see, memristors did not actually exist.
Except that they do. Within the past couple of years, memristors have morphed from obscure jargon into one of the hottest properties in physics. They've not only been made, but their unique capabilities might revolutionise consumer electronics. More than that, though, along with completing the jigsaw of electronics, they might solve the puzzle of how nature makes that most delicate and powerful of computers - the brain.
That would be a fitting pay-off for a story which, in its beginnings, is a triumph of pure logic. Back in 1971, Chua was examining the four basic quantities that define an electronic circuit. First, there is electric charge. Then there is the change in that charge over time, better known as current. Currents create magnetic fields, leading to a third variable, magnetic flux, which characterises the field's strength. Finally, magnetic flux varies with time, leading to the quantity we call voltage.
Four interconnected things, mathematics says, can be related in six ways. Charge and current, and magnetic flux and voltage, are connected through their definitions. That's two. Three more associations correspond to the three traditional circuit elements. A resistor is any device that, when you pass current through it, creates a voltage. For a given voltage a capacitor will store a certain amount of charge. Pass a current through an inductor, and you create a magnetic flux. That makes five. Something missing?
Indeed. Where was the device that connected charge and magnetic flux? The short answer was there wasn't one. But there should have been.
Chua set about exploring what this device would do. It was something that no combination of resistors, capacitors and inductors would do. Because moving charges make currents, and changing magnetic fluxes breed voltages, the new device would generate a voltage from a current rather like a resistor, but in a complex, dynamic way. In fact, Chua calculated, it would behave like a resistor that could "remember" what current had flowed through it before (see diagram). Thus the memristor was born.

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For the rest of the article (too big to post as well as comments...)

I really am amazed at what this discovery could mean. Memory-on-a-chip? REAL instant-on computers? Fuzzy logic? I think that this discovery along with quantum computing and Human brain like interconnectivity between chips is the road ahead for computing. A very good friend of mine who is an Electrical engineer told me that the real bottleneck in PC speed is memory and the need to always use Hard Drive. This dropped the speed at which the PC could operate by 10 to 200 times. (Static memory is always too slow for the rest of the computer to do anything about it but use it as storage area, or so I have been told. I did some research and found this to be true).

If any given chip comes with a way for it to remember the state it was in the last time it was activated, aka had current run through it, doesn't this mean that the solution to that problem has been found? If so, I would like some of the most technical inclined to answer. Thx in advace. If it could mean a 10 fold increase in PC speed and alleviate the memory bottleneck that all sort of Cache and intelligent design has tried to circumvent ever since the first PC in 1981, that would be an absolutely stunning breakthrough.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

This was a revelation. For 50 years, electronics engineers had been building networks of dozens of transistors - the building blocks of memory chips - to store single bits of information without knowing it was memristance they were attempting to simulate. Now Williams, standing on the shoulders of Chua, had showed that a single tiny component was all they needed.
The most immediate potential use is as a powerful replacement for flash memory - the kind used in applications that require quick writing and rewriting capabilities, such as in cameras and USB memory sticks. Like flash memory, memristive memory can only be written 10,000 times or so before the constant atomic movements within the device cause it to break down. That makes it unsuitable for computer memories. Still, Williams believes it will be possible to improve the durability of memristors. Then, he says, they could be just the thing for a superfast random access memory (RAM), the working memory that computers use to store data on the fly, and ultimately even for hard drives.

In any case, I have to say I do admire Proffessor Leon Chua of Berkeley university. Not only did he lay the theoritical groundwork for this amazing discovery back in 1971 but as times caught up with it he took it up and is running with it, always testing and trying new things. Some of those seem scary at first (Terminator anyone?) but ultimately I do believe that things will turn out for the best.

It is really gratifying however. All that intelligent design to circumvent the fact that the chip couldn't store its own state at shutdown (but for flash memory but that is proving to be very expensive and less fast than hoped) and here come two scientists who...

Now Williams, standing on the shoulders of Chua, had showed that a single tiny component was all they needed.

Which is why I replaced my "ΔΗΜΗΤΡΗΣ ΤΣΑΦΕΝΤΑΣ" name under my avatar. He was a great man, who killed a beast. He is called a mad man by most people but that doesn't change what he did. We really do have to move on, however, to where the greener pastures lie: Futurewards. Therefore, and as a very intelligent person back in 1971 theorized something that only now in 2009 became self evident to most scientists of his field, I chose to use his name to honor him and his achievement.

However, I am not as well versed in Technical matters as I would like. I am just like most people you meet. In here, however, there are very intelligent and educated scientists who could enlighten the rest of us, myself included.

So, if you please, post your own opinion of what you consider the implication of the above discovery on the future of computing and progress in general. It might turn out to be insignificant, after all.
Thx to everyone who will contribute, in advance.

[C-Rob]

interesting. First, it would mean that things got done a hell of a lot faster. it would be neat if it could be used to, say, the power went off, and the moment it came back on, it'd be like nothing even happened. THAT would be sweet, especially if that's just by the inherent traits of the system, meaning no resource-consuming background program/memory use.

The first thing that gets this is a super computer. Omega-fy-ing it.

Imagine all the energy we could save if a computer could fully boot up and shutdown at will in less than a second!? That would be an epic leap in home pc use.

[Simetrical]

This is speculative technology at this point, people. It might not end up being useful at all. I'm sure it won't be useful in the next five years. You can have promising technology that ends up not being workable: look at holographic storage.

interesting. First, it would mean that things got done a hell of a lot faster. it would be neat if it could be used to, say, the power went off, and the moment it came back on, it'd be like nothing even happened. THAT would be sweet, especially if that's just by the inherent traits of the system, meaning no resource-consuming background program/memory use.

The bottleneck in boot time isn't usually disk, it's just poor design. Ubuntu 10.04 is planned to have ten-second boot on cheap netbook hardware, just from obvious software improvements: read files in advance, etc. You can get it down to five seconds on an ordinary SSD without even cutting significant features. I'm sure Microsoft could do the same as Linux ― although since it can't change the whole stack, it might have more trouble than Canonical.

Try booting from a memory disk. That's a lot faster than memristors theoretically should be, and I can guarantee you it will take more than a second on a normal OS. To get that kind of speed you'd have to skip initialization, do something like hibernation and just read a memory image. And you already can get instant suspension with very low power usage by just turning off everything except RAM. So boot time really is not germane here.

We already have permanent storage that's even faster than this memristor stuff, anyway. It's just much too expensive to supplant hard disks. The issue is price. And nobody will know how much practical memristor-based storage will cost until it's up to the prototype stage.

So really, there's nothing to get excited about here. It's just a possible future technology that may or may not work.

[Baron von Sky Hat]

I agree with Simetrical. I recall covering some stuff in my electronics A-level with regards to memristors.
It's important to bare in mind that, in addition to it being essentially speculative technology at this point, it will only be a small level component, just as resistors and capacitors are. It won't necessarily mean that all computers will be able to retain every aspect of their operation regardless of power.
It has been around for a fairly long time now really, I understand it's mostly been technological/engineering constraints that's prevented it getting further. It's potentially a very very interesting concept. Could mean a lot in terms of things like efficiency and capability of computers, but from what I know, I haven't heard that it will herald any sort of paradigm shift in the computing field though. It's a component that could make things a lot better, but I don't know if it will fundamentally change anything that hasn't been gradually changing through other methods anyway.
I'm going to read some more about them, as I remember little from my A-level material (which probably wasn't in great depth anyway), will try and contribute more once I understand the working of memristors themselves better.



edit:
Found these couple of papers which are very nice descriptions of the effect of memristors. http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0808.0286 and http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0807.3994 .
Don't have much in detail to say about them right now (have to work), but the effects that they have are very interesting indeed. As with capacitance, resistance and inductance, it's essentially better thought of as an effect, rather than a device. While there are components called capacitors, resistors and inductors, these are effectively just labels for the most dominant effect that they display. For example, any conventional inductor (just think of a coil of wire) will also have a resistance; any device incorporating metal separated by an insulator will have a capacitance; etc.
It seems as though some examples of unexplained slight hysteresis in some existing devices could be explained by the systems possessing a memristance. In this respect, although the effect isn't always very pronounced, it's fundamental to the proper mathematical mapping of even existing circuits. I'm certainly quite optimistic about the use of the memristor effect in electronics in the future, from what I see, it's a little more than a potential invention to add to the field, but a bit more fundamental than that. Though that's not exactly a balanced perspective, having only read a couple of papers on it, but nevertheless, it certainly has potential, whether that can be exploited or not is less certain, but that's what I'm optimistic about.

[Keravnos]

Thank you both for the educated replies. Even as I accept your valued criticism of such a novel concept, I will retain the title I have chosen as Proffessor Leon O. Chua did theorize something which came to fruition nearly 4 decades after he spoke of it. Such men of vision are to be admired and honored, which is what I have tried to do.

[Baron von Sky Hat]

I don't think anyone was questioning his scientific acumen (I certainly wasn't), merely the potential of the technology itself. As I said, memristance itself seems to explain an awful lot and be a fairly fundamental building block in genuinely understanding electronics. What I feel is more in question is the capability to mass produce and use specific memristor devices practically.
Prof. Chua does seem a genuine genius type, anyone that can manage a theory which accurately predicts and describes something that can't physically be done for several decades very much gets a `thumbs up' in my opinion. Certainly any number of scientists, such as Chua, make big contributions to a field, yet seem not to pick up the same wider notability as some others who are perceived to work in more `interesting' fields. However, looking at his list of awards and honorary degrees, he certainly has a fairly substantial notability within his field (anyone with 9 honorary doctorates is clearly thought to be doing something well by a good few people ).

For the technology itself I think that, at best for computers, it could be used to improve performance in several areas. But what seems to be the focus of a number of people looking into the idea is neural networks, which does seem a field where a device with non-linear response such as a memristor could potentially be hugely important. We live in interesting times indeed, the progress of technology is beyond the wildest dreams of some people merely 100 years ago. Or even less than that, I don't think people early in the computer industry had much of an idea of just how massively widespread computer use would become over the course of a few decades.

[Ummon]

I disagree with the criticism, the finding is highly interesting. No need to be fans, but you get rep.