Tech Shout!

HP has announced that researchers at HP Labs have developed Memristor, the fourth fundamental circuit element in electrical engineering. Memristor features resistor, capacitor and inductor. Further it also has properties that could not be reproduced by any combination of the other three elements.

HP claims that with the help of the Memristor, a computer system that has memories that does not forget, does not need to be booted up and consumes far less power, can be developed. Such computer systems will even associate information in a manner similar to that of the human brain.

Leon Chua, a distinguished faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department of the University of California at Berkeley is the one who theorized about and named the element in an academic paper published 37 years ago. Also he said that fourth fundamental circuit element Memristor was the fourth fundamental circuit element which will include resistor, capacitor and inductor, and that it had properties that could not be duplicated by any combination of the other three elements.

“To find something new and yet so fundamental in the mature field of electrical engineering is a big surprise, and one that has significant implications for the future of computer science,” said R. Stanley Williams, Leader, HP Labs’ Information and Quantum Systems Lab.

“By providing a mathematical model for the physics of a memristor, HP Labs has made it possible for engineers to develop integrated circuit designs that could dramatically improve the performance and energy efficiency of PCs and data centers,” Williams said.

Memristor could emerge as a new kind of computer memory that would supplement and eventually replace today’s commonly used dynamic random access memory (DRAM), claims HP. Computers using conventional DRAM fail to retain information once they lose power. When power is restored, a DRAM-based computer goes through boot-up process, which is necessary to retrieve data from a magnetic disk required to run the system.

Also HP says that Memristor-based memory and storage is capable enough to lower power consumption and provide greater resiliency and reliability in the face of power interruptions to a data center.

The power of Memristor to associate information in a manner similar to that of the human brain can improve facial recognition technology, enabling security and privacy features that recognize a complex set of biometric features of an authorized person to access personal information, or enable an appliance to learn from experience.