Insanityville

Evolution in electronics – memristors – the missing link

By on May 5th, 2008

Almost everybody knows a thing or two about basic electronic components. We all know that a resistor is used limit the electric current when it passes through it (it also causes a voltage drop depending on the value of the resistor), a capacitor is used to store power or as a filter in power sources, we use the inductance and impedance of a coil to create audio filters (with an additional capacitor), speakers, low, medium and high power transformers and, of course, the transistor that is used to amplify electric signal. We all know that. These are the basic elements found inside every microchip.

Now, a new component is making it’s way into our lives. The memristor. It’s short for “memory resistor”.

"A memristor is essentially a resistor with memory," explains Stan Williams of HPLabs in Palo Alto, California. "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."

This is not a new concept, but, due to the technological impediments of the ’70, it couldn’t be built. It was first suggested it 1971 by Leon Chua, the electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, who first postulated the existence of memristors in a 1971 paper².

After 37 years, Stan Williams and his colleagues finally built it. The problems encountered by Leon Chua was the size of the component.

Nanotechnology for Dummies

Size matters in this case. Williams and his colleagues placed a nanoscopic film of a semiconductor (titanium dioxide) between two slivers of metal (platinum). Those are standard materials; the trick is to make the component just 5 nanometres wide — about 10,000 times thinner than a human hair. Any larger and it would behave like a regular resistor.

Memristors - Memresistive systems

The applicability of this new component is, of course, in the computer technology. Imagine having a computer that can remember it’s exact state upon shutdown. It wouldn’t need to boot up. They can also be fashioned into non-volatile solid-state memory, which would allow greater data density than hard drives with access times potentially similar to DRAM, replacing both components.

More information can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

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