Memsitors, the new kid on the block - Essay Example

For example, when Bell telephone laboratories announced to the world the invention of the transistor in 1948, the press of the day announced that more than hundred could be held in the palm of the hand (Hayes, 2011). Today with the current technologies more than a 100 billion of these can be held at the palm of the hand. What is more interesting was that the transistors even cost less than dollar per a billion today. They are therefore the most abundant and cheapest electronic gadgets in the human history.

Currently the trinity fundamental components in electronics that consist of the resistor, the transistor and the capacitor are well known in the electronic field. In 1971 an Engineer in the university of California Berkeley, predicted that there should be a fourth element; a memory resistor, or memristor though no one seemed aware of it or how to build one (Williams, 2008). 37 years later in 2008 the field of electronics got small enough to reveal the identity and the nature of the fourth element to complete the above set as was predicted by the engineer.

Hewlett Packard researchers revealed in the journal nature of the fourth component; the memristor, which is the new kid on the block in the electronics field. The story behind memristor dates back to about 40 years ago from the insight by IEEE Fellow and nonlinear circuit theory pioneer Leon Chua (Adee, 2008). Chua when examining the relationship between the flux resistors and charge in resistors, capacitors and inductors in a 1971 paper, he postulated the existence of a fourth element called the memory resistor.

According to Chua such a device once discovered would provide similar relationship and proportions between the magnetic flux and charge the same that a resistor gives between voltage and current. Therefore, Chua argued that the memory resistor would act like a resistor whose value could be able to vary according to the current passing through it and that could remember the value long after the current disappears (Adee, 2008). This was to be realized more than 30 years later, when Stanley Williams a HP senior fellow and his group were critically analyzing and working on molecular electronics when they noticed strange behavior in their devices.

It was after critically examining the theoretical works and especially the work of Chua that Williams noticed that the strange phenomena that they observed were actually as a result of memristors. One important aspect of memristors is that it proves right the suspicion that many researchers had for a long time that detailed that artificial intelligence was not possible with the traditional hardware due to its rigid use of the Boolean logic and the vast separation that exist between the memory and processing (Versace & Chandler, 2010).

It was in 2008 when the HP researchers built the new class of electronic device; the memristor. Before this invention, it would have been impossible to create a new circuit with the memory structure of a brain, the instantaneous internal communications and the low power requirements. Form the invention of the memristor, it was evident that the three components could be coaxed and trained to behave just a like a normal brain with more emphasis with form that was termed to be a major fusion in this set up.

Generally, memristors are small, cheap and most efficient to fill this gap in the electronics industry. They might be explained to have characteristics that resemble those of synapses in normal humans,