In May, HP Labs announced proof of the memristor, or memory resistor, a new element in electrical engineering considered the fourth fundamental circuit element after the resistor, capacitor and inductor. But back in 1971, nearly 40 years ago, electrical engineering professor Leon Chua proposed the existence of the memristor in IEEE Transactions on Circuit Theory, winning the W.R.G. Baker Prize for his work.

While scientists have known about it for decades, the memristor was difficult to find because it works on a nano scale and requires sophisticated techniques to pin down. “It’s similar to the prediction of new chemical elements from the periodic table, invented by Mendeleev,” Chua says. “I did expect the memristor to be found someday, but I did not expect it to be found in my lifetime.”

HP engineers say they could one day use the memristor to replace dynamic random access memory (D-RAM) computers with machines that remember data even when the power is switched off, and—here’s the cool part—without consuming lots of time and energy to boot up. 

 Go to http://spectrum.ieee.org/may08/6207 for more.

By Megan Mansell Williams | Photo Credit: Peg Skorpinski