HP has made a breakthrough discovery which added a fourth passive component type after resistors, capacitors and inductors. Its scientists at HP Labs, the company’s central research facility, have created an element which has the unique property of retaining a history of the information it has acquired, called a memristor.

This element has been foreshadowed by Leon Chua, a distinguished faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department of the University of California at Berkeley, some 37 years ago. However, making the previously theoretical element has proved elusive, until now. The memristor is basically an element in which the magnetic flux and the electric charge are related by a time-independent function.

“To find something new and yet so fundamental in the mature field of electrical engineering is a big surprise, and one that has significant implications for the future of computer science,” said lead researcher Stanley Williams.

“By providing a mathematical model for the physics of a memristor, HP Labs has made it possible for engineers to develop integrated circuit designs that could dramatically improve the performance and energy efficiency of PCs and data centers,” Williams said.

Stanley Williams and his three colleagues at HP Labs’ Information and Quantum Systems Lab have published a paper in today’s edition of Nature detailing their findings.

A memristor will eventually enable the making of computer systems that do not need to be booted up and consume far less power than today's systems. Classical DRAM memory needs constant power to maintain the information, while the new element can lead to memory systems which require power only to change the data stored, but none to maintain the information. Also, a power outage will not affect the stored information.

The announcement comes after IBM researchers have described in two papers published in the April 11 issue of Science a technology that could change radically the way we are storing our electronic data and it could lead to a new class of electronic devices.

The new technology, called racetrack memory, combines the main advantages of flash memory and hard drives. Racetrack memory will offer not only the high performance and reliability of flash, but also high capacity and low costs. The IBM researchers noted that the racetrack memory could enable a handheld device to store close to one half million songs or around 3,500 movies. Racetrack memory will have also another major advantage: it requires much less power and it generates less heat.