Memristors express memristance, which is a property of an electronic component that "remembers" the last resistance an electrical circuit had

before it was switched off. Here's the really cool thing about memristors: Memristance strength is in inverse proportion to the size of the circuit. In other words, the smaller the circuit, the stronger the memristance and the more powerful the memristor. This is one of the features that make memristors so attractive to manufacturers, because they can offer increasing capability in smaller devices, and these devices require less power. Other memristor features that manufacturers like are their speed (memristors are faster than solid-state storage technologies such as flash memory), their capacity (they can store at least twice as much data in the same area as flash technology), their durability (they are almost immune to radiation), and their memory retention (they let manufacturers build computers that turn on and off like a light switch because they do not forget).

Possible Uses for Memristors

Memristive devices can operate in digital or analog modes. Each of these has different applications. In digital mode, they could replace solid-state flash memory with faster, less expensive non-volatile random access memory. This could enable the creation of digital cameras that don't need to pause between taking photographs, or computers that save power by turning themselves off when they're not needed and turning themselves on again when in use, without losing memory. In analog mode, memristors may let manufacturers build computers that learn what users want through pattern-matching abilities that would let it change its user interface according to how the owner uses the device. These pattern-matching abilities also make memristors suitable for artificial intelligence applications such as understanding speech.

HP Plans Memristor-Based Memory Chips

HP has already created development-ready architectures for memory chips using memristors. It believes such chips could become commercially available within the next few years. Perhaps HP is being too optimistic about the timeframe. "Like any other memory architecture or memory solution, it takes high volumes and large amounts of investment before it makes sense to go to manufacturing," Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at In-Stat, pointed out. "Any time somebody says something is feasible in the next X number of years, you can probably double or triple that figure."