Finally, after about thirty years mouldered in the shelf, a concept of the fourth fundamental element of electronic circuits - named as ‘memristors’- has now found its prove. The prove was built by Stanley William research group at Hewlett Packard (HP). You who are familiar with electronics circuits know the already-known three fundamental elements: the resistor, the capacitor, and the inductor.

The first Memristor - an abbreviation of memory resistor- concept was introduced by Professor Leon Chua on 1971. Acording to him, memristors will provide a similar relationship between magnetic flux and charge that a resistor gives between voltage and current. In practice, that mean it act like a resistor whose value could vary according to the current passing through it and which will remember that value even after the current disappeared.

However, noone knew how to build such device and since then Memristor had remained as hypothesis and mostly disccused as a mathematical model. This probably because electronics were originally developed at a scale far too large from a nanoscopics scale. According to William, only at the nanoscale that the behaviour of memristors begins to be detectable. In a larger scale, they behave just like ordinary resistors, where resistance is equal to the voltage divided by the current.

So, how would this enhancement bring a revolutionary change? The main difference, if I may say so, between memristors and ordinary resistors is its ability to ‘remember’.

The classic analogy for a resistor is a pipe through which water (electricity) runs. The width of the pipe is analogous to the resistance of the flow of current-the narrower the pipe, the greater the resistance. Normal resistors have an unchanging pipe size. A memristor, on the other hand, changes with the amount of water that gets pushed through. If you push water through the pipe in one direction, the pipe gets larger (less resistive). If you push the water in the other direction, the pipe gets smaller (more resistive). And the memristor remembers. When the water flow is turned off, the pipe size does not change.

In more practical discussion, memristor could allow development of new computer model which doesn’t need to reboot on each start up. The reason why the recent computer model need to reboot on each start up is that their logic circuits are incapable of holding their bits after the power is shut off. Since memristors can remember voltage, they doesn’t need to reboot.

With a memristors-driven computer you can leave your Word files and spreadsheets open, turn off your computer and get everything instantly back on the screen in the same condition as when you leave it, when you back and turning on you computer.

Memristors can also allow the development of a laptops that retain sessions after the battery dies, or mobile phones that can last for weeks without needing a charge.