New Fundamental Circuit Element

[RWebb]

Tired of just the 3? Resistors, Inductors, Capacitors?

Bored with the mere ability to change r based on direction (diode) or an applied voltage (transistors)?

This should knock your socks off:

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/04/scientists-prov.html

[Jim Richards]

Very cool.

[nostatic]

and intelligently designed

[Jim Richards]

and they had a devil of a time making it.

[nostatic]

luckily some angel VC funding came in to resurrect the project. Hallelujah!

[Jim Richards]

This thread is evolving in a way no one could prophesied.

Todd, I suggest we apologize to the thread's creator. Sorry!

[nostatic]

Let's end this Old Thread and begin a New Thread.

[island911]

Good post'n Randy. -thanks!

[island911]

Sooo . .. is that pronounced memri-stor . ..mem-rister . . .?

[kstar]

Besides the coolness of creating non-volatile, solid state memory, being able to hook up these very small memristors to make really small transistors could be another way to keep Moore's Law "true".

edit: See the Wiki here with several references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

edit2: Nature subscribers can find the recent paper here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7191/full/453042a.html

The prospect of using them to create an artificial brain is most interesting. I've read about a project where the researchers are actually modeling a neuron ( http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/03/out_of_the_blue.php ) on a chip. They have 2,000 such "chip" neurons running now simulating a slice of rat brain.

Super-small transistors built from memristors, with their special properties, could be the missing link (had to keep the theme going! ) to artificial brain projects.

Best,

[m21sniper]

"I'm afraid i can't do that Dave."

[dhoward]

Fundamentalist circuit elements have been responsible for terrorizing electrons since biblical times.
Oh, wait.
What?

[onewhippedpuppy]

Cool stuff.

[Aurel]

I wonder if diodes are considered a special kind of resistors, or can be represented by a combination of the 3 fundamental elements. Anyone knows? That would help me for fitting impedance data on solar cells with equivalent circuit software. Sorry for the hijack, the memristor is cool .

Aurel