Wednesday, April 30, 2008

A Memristor?

Quick, before you read this, what do you think is a "memristor"?

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Give up? It's a resistor with a "memory"!! I didn't know that either!

The existence of the memristor, short for 'memory resistor', was first suggested in 1971, but only now have researchers succeeded in creating a real, working example. They hope that the new components could revolutionize computing, promising an end to frustrating waits for your computer to boot up.

"A memristor is essentially a resistor with memory," explains Stan Williams of HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, who reports the memristor's creation in this week's Nature. "The actual resistance of the memristor changes depending on the amount of voltage and the time for which that voltage has been applied to the device."


The reference to the paper is:

D.B. Strukov et al., Nature 453, 80–83 (2008).

Fascinating!

Zz.

2 comments:

Abraham Akinin said...

This would do away with linearity properties and the mathematics would get considerably more difficult. i doubt it can be taught at the college introductory level, let alone high school as the article claims.

pretty cool though

voodooKobra said...

Abraham: I'm a high school student (Senior year) and I understand the gist of it.

However, I agree that high school might not be a good place to start teaching something like this (at least until we understand it in better and simpler terms).