nanoREV.

Memristors set to revolutionize nanoelectronics

Typically passive electronic components are divided into three categories - resistors, capacitors, and inductors. According to this recent article in EETimes, a fourth passive component referred to as a “Memristor” was discovered by Stanley Williams group at Hewlett Packard. The material for this new component is taught to be based on a bilayer of titanium dioxide having the properties of a resistor which remembers the current states that have flowed through the material producing a hysteresis effect. The article suggests that the memristor functions similarly to a neuron and, when combined with the nanowire crossbar structure previously developed by HP may be used in a variety of image recognition applications. In fact, this recent patent by Greg Snider of HP teaches such a neural net nanoscale crossbar circuit.

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