Missing Link of Electronics Discovered: "Memristor" [News]
Thursday, May 1, 2008 - 11:28
in Physics & Chemistry
After nearly 40 years, researchers have discovered a new type of building block for electronic circuits. And there's at least a chance it will spare you from recharging your phone every other day. Scientists at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, Calif., report in Nature that a new nanometer-scale electric switch "remembers" whether it is on or off after its power is turned off. (A nanometer is one billionth of a meter.)Researchers believe that the memristor, or memory resistor, might become a useful tool for constructing nonvolatile computer memory, which is not lost when the power goes off, or for keeping the computer industry on pace to satisfy Moore's law, the exponential growth in processing power every 18 months. [More]