HP today announced that researchers from HP Labs, the company’s
central research facility, have proven the existence of what had
previously been only theorized as the fourth fundamental circuit
element in electrical engineering.

This scientific advancement could make it possible to develop
computer systems that have memories that do not forget, do not need to
be booted up, consume far less power and associate information in a
manner similar to that of the human brain.

In a paper published in today’s edition of Nature, four
researchers at HP Labs’ Information and Quantum Systems Lab, led by R.
Stanley Williams, presented the mathematical model and a physical
example of a “memristor” – a blend of “memory resistor” – which has the
unique property of retaining a history of the information it has
acquired.

Leon Chua, a distinguished faculty member in the Electrical
Engineering and Computer Sciences Department of the University of
California at Berkeley, initially theorized about and named the element
in an academic paper published 37 years ago. Chua argued that the
memristor was the fourth fundamental circuit element, along with the
resistor, capacitor and inductor, and that it had properties that could
not be duplicated by any combination of the other three elements.

Source: HP Labs. Read more at the HP Labs website>>

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