Memristors -- Re-Write the EE Texts

[dtengineering]

Ah the wonders of wikipedia! While searching up data about cars (trying to convince my wife that I really can fit a C4 Corvette in the garage along with the motorcycles), I noticed the "news" link announcing the discovery of Memristors... the fourth fundamental electronic component (joining Capacitors, Inductors and Resistors).

Surely there is a Nobel prize in the offing for Leon Chua who predicted the memristor back in 1971, as well as the team at HP Labs who discovered a way to produce it and announced their discovery recently.

There are many articles on this topic, but the one I found best was here:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may08/6207

It is discoveries like this that just floor me... apparently memristance had been observed for decades, but no one knew what they were looking at. It required nano-scale materials to make it so obvious that it couldn't be ignored. Who knows how many other fundamental discoveries remain to be made and what practical applications they might have.

Jason