Just like there are resistors, inductors and capacitors, presence of another element called as memristor was predicted in 1971 by professor Leon Chau. It took 37 years for someone to develop it. HP labs has done this feat. Memristor, in short remembers the current passing through it and accordingly changes it resistance. The greatest thing about it is that it performs better as you scale it down, meaning high density chips will be easier to make as against what happens when transistors are packed together.
By all that it looks like, it seems to be a revolution in electronics and is going to redefine nano-technology. Here is a intriguing statement by professor Chau,
“The situation is analogous to what is called Aristotle’s Law of Motion, which was wrong, because he said that force must be proportional to velocity. That misled people for 2000 years until Newton came along and pointed out that Aristotle was using the wrong variables. Newton said that force is proportional to acceleration — the change in velocity. This is exactly the situation with electronic circuit theory today. All electronic text books have been teaching using the wrong variables — voltage and charge–explaining away inaccuracies as anomalies. What they should have been teaching is the relationship between changes in voltage, or flux, and charge.”
And surprise. Memristor’s technically correct name happens to be “Flux Capacitor”. You’ll know what I mean if you have seen the “Back to the Future” trilogy. And if the science in that was correct(ahem)..which used flux capacitor as the basis for time travel…Wait a minute, Doc…ah
