Printed Circuit Design & Fab Online Magazine - New Electronics Component Created

PALO ALTO, CA - Hewlett-Packard's Professor Stan Williams has helped develop 'memristors', an entirely new type of electronic device, which could make ICs smaller and much more efficient.

The new component, described by HP scientists, was theorized as possible almost 40 years ago, but have only recently been fabricated, the team wrote in the journal Nature. They have been called the “fourth basic building block of circuits”, after capacitors, resistors and inductors.

"Now we have this type of device we have a broader palette with which to paint our circuits," according to Professor Williams.

Memristors were first proposed in 1971 by Professor Leon Chua, a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. "I never thought I'd live long enough to see this happen," Professor Chua told the Associated Press. "I'm thrilled because it's almost like vindication. Something I did is not just in my imagination, it's fundamental."

The devices are called memristors because of their capability to "remember" the amount of charge that was flowing through them at the point when power was switched off.

This could allow researchers to build new kinds of computer memory that would hold information without power applied. PCs now typically use DRAM which loses data when it loses power, but memristors could allow PCs to start up instantly where they left off, allow laptops to would retain sessions after a battery dies, or mobile phone batteries that can hold a charge for weeks.

"If you turn on your computer it will come up instantly where it was when you turned it off," Professor Williams said in a Reuters interview. "That is a very interesting potential application, and one that is very realistic."

Professor Williams and his team have already shown that by putting two memristors together in a configuration called a crossbar latch, it could do the job of a transistor. "A crossbar latch has the... functionality [of] a transistor, but it's working with very different physics," he explained.

Reportedly, these devices can also be made much smaller than a conventional transistor, "and as they get smaller they get better," Williams said. As a result, the new components could be the path that electronics technology takes as it continues to pursue Moore's Law, the axiom which states that the number of transistors it is possible to squeeze in to a chip for a fixed cost doubles every two years.

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