HP discovers new type of electronic component

HP finds 'Missing link' in Electronics

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.

"My situation was similar to that of the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev who invented the periodic table in 1869," said Chua. "Mendeleev postulated that there were elements missing from the table, and now all those elements have been found. Likewise, Stanley Williams at HP Labs has now found the first example of the missing memristor circuit element."

When Chua wrote his seminal paper, he used mathematics to deduce the existence of a fourth circuit element type after resistors, capacitors and inductors, which he called a memristor, because it "remembers" changes in the current passing through it by changing its resistance. Now HP claims to have discovered the first instance of a memristor, which it created with a bi-level titanium dioxide thin-film that changes its resistance when current passes through it.

"This new circuit element solves many problems with circuitry today--since it improves in performance as you scale it down to smaller and smaller sizes," said Chua. "Memristors will enable very small nanoscale devices to be made without generating all the excess heat that scaling down transistors is causing today."

HP has already tested the material in its ultra-high-density crossbar switches, which use nanowires to pack a record 100 Gbits onto a single die--compared with 16 Gbits for the highest density flash memory chips extant.

"We have been looking for years for the best material to use in our ultra-dense nanowire crossbar switches, which can fit 100 billion crossbars into a square centimeter. What we have finally realized is that the ideal material is a memristor," said Williams, primary inventor of the memristor's titanium-dioxide-based material and founding director of HP's 12-year-old Information and Quantum Systems Lab, where his team perfected its formulation.

The hold-up over the last 37 years, according to professor Chua, has been a misconception that has pervaded electronic circuit theory. That misconception is that the fundamental relationship in passive circuitry is between voltage and charge. What the researchers contend is that the fundamental relationship is actually between changes-in-voltage, or flux, and charge. Such is the insight that enabled HP to invent the memristor, according to Chua and Williams.

"Electronic theorists have been using the wrong pair of variables all these years--voltage and charge. The missing part of electronic theory was that the fundamental pair of variables is flux and charge," said Chua. "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."

HP invited Chua to speak about his theory a few years ago, but at that time the lab did not tell Chua that they were actively seeking the memristor. Only two weeks ago did Williams tell Chua that he had used the proper variables--flux and charge--to invent the world's first working memristor.

A memristor works by virtue of hysteresis, whereby its rate of change accelerates as it moves from one state to the other--"on" to "off," or vice versa. Hysteresis has been explained away by current circuit theory as an anomaly, according to Chua and Williams, whereas its existence is, in fact, a fundamental property of passive circuitry.

I'm reminded of something my son Thomas said when he was about nine. "Dad, why doesn't light accelerate? Everything else does." I had to admit I did not know the answer. Maybe answering that question will help figure out some of the missing pieces in unified field theory. After all, Einstein was inspired to think about relativity by watching the trains just outside his window at the patent office. Light certainly changes speed as it enters and exits different materials ... but in a vacuum - why doesn't light have an acceleration component?

Please hand your papers in by next Friday.


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