H-P Sees Second Future for Novel Breed of Circuitry
Stan Williams is one of Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) most oft-quoted scientists, dreaming up electronic devices that are almost too small to imagine. He and his colleagues are discussing another feat of micro-magic on Thursday, this time concerning a novel piece of circuitry dubbed a memristor.
The creation–whose name combines memory and resistor–was postulated in 1971 by a professor named Leon Chua and turned into working prototypes by H-P in 2008. Among other things, memristors are expected to store data in a much smaller space than conventional transistors. That’s a big deal, because experts believe that it will eventually become impossible to keep shrinking transistors in chips such as flash memory to keep improving the storage capacity of those products.
Nearly all of the discussion about memristors so far, in fact, has focused on their use data storage.
