Memristor - Fundamental science discovery

Mach · 06-09-08, 02:51 PM

Pretty cool discovery that appears thankfully to have legs for future technology improvements. I hate when they discover something that would have been cool to know 10 years ago but is out-dated by the time it's discovered. Note later they mention how it can mimic neural activity (or what we know of it).

EETimes.com - 'Missing link' memristor created: Rewrite the textbooks?

Quote:

PORTLAND, Ore. — The long-sought after memristor--the "missing link" in electronic circuit theory--has been invented by Hewlett Packard Senior Fellow R. Stanley Williams at HP Labs (Palo Alto, Calif.) Memristors--the fourth passive component type after resistors, capacitors and inductors--were postulated in a seminal 1971 paper in the IEEE Transactions on Circuit Theory by professor Leon Chua at the University of California (Berkeley), but their first realization was just announced today by HP. According to Williams and Chua, now virtually every electronics textbook will have to be revised to include the memristor and the new paradigm it represents for electronic circuit theory.

And it was hiding in plain sight. In fact, someone with minimal science background and a good firm logical bent may have also been able to identify the error in previous thinking:

Quote:

"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 textbooks 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."

-Mach