A Memristor is one of 4 fundamental electrical devices, the other 3 are Resistors, Capacitors, and Inductors,
A Resistor links current and voltage A Capacitor links charge and voltage A Inductor links magnetic flux and current As far back as 1971 it was hypothesized that there must be a fourth type, called a "Memristor" , that links magnetic flux and charge, but at the time nobody knew of a substance that behaved that way. About 10 years ago it was found that compounds made of rare elements, such as niobium dioxide and vanadium dioxide, did behave like Memristors, but they were not practical devices because they are very expensive and broke down after only a small amount of use. But in yesterday's issue of the journal Nature researchers report they have found that an iron atom bound to a simple organic molecule is a cheap dependable Memristor, and they have even used that substance to make a nanoscale Microchip that can process information. It's conceivable Memristors could totally supplant transistors because not only can they switch from a conductive to an insulating state faster than a transistor they can do so by using much less energy, and unlike transistors, they can remember their previous state and act as a sort of synthetic neuron. The researchers were able to alter the logical layout of their chip simply by changing the voltage they applied to it. A Memristor can even perform some types of analog information processing. The researchers said it would take thousands of transistors to perform the same computational functions as just one of their molecular scale Memristors, so they will probably first find applications where power is limited, such as in handheld devices and sensors. Decision trees within a molecular memristor <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03748-0> John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv28YmTyf0Euxrf6aXMFDysf6ju-MTbBgQOgDKPG1Y7uWg%40mail.gmail.com.
