A memristor is a type of resistor in which the flow of electrical current in an electronic circuit is determined by the amount of charge that

has previously flowed through it. Together, capacitors, inductors and resistors form the three basic circuit elements. The reason that the memristor is so different from the other three basic circuit elements is that, unlike them, it retains memory without power. In layman's terms, this means that if you did a hard shutdown on your computer and then restarted it, all the applications and documents you had open before you shut down would still be right there on your screen when you restarted. That's an effect that can't be duplicated by any circuit combination of resistors, capacitors and inductors today, which is why researchers feel the memristor qualifies as a fourth fundamental circuit element.

1971 Leon Chua, a professor at UC Berkeley, postulates a new two-terminal circuit element characterized by a relationship between charge and flux linkage as a fourth fundamental circuit element in the article "Memristor-the Missing Circuit Element " published in IEEE Transactions on Circuit Theory. In 2008, a team at HP Labs announced the development of a switching memristor based on a thin film of titanium dioxide. These devices are being developed for application in nanoelectronic memories, computer logic, and neuromorphic computer architectures.[6] In October 2011, the same team announced the commercial availability of memristor technology within 18 months, as a replacement for Flash, SSD, DRAM and SRAM. Memristor will keep the computer power and memory increasing for years to come. Memristor is short for memory resistor. Memristors are currently being tested at HP Labs to create a more dense and energy-efficient memory chip, yes a memory chip. Memory chips embedded with memristors would work similar to flash drives and retain data even after your computer has been powered off or shut down. But keep in mind these things will replace RAM and hard drives. Like silicon,titanium dioxide is a semiconductor and its pure state is highly resistive.However, it can be doped with other elements to make it very conductive. The memristor can: It can be scaled to very large scale geometries without losing its properties. - Non-volatile memory applications: Memristors can retain memory states, and data, in power-off modes. Non-volatile random access memory, or NVRAM, is pretty much the first to-market memristor application well be seeing. There are already 3nm Memristors in fabrication now. Crossbar latch memory (see below) developed by Hewlett Packard is reportedly currently about one-tenth the speed of DRAM. - Low-power and remote sensing applications: coupled with memcapacitors and meminductors, the complementary circuits to the memristor which allow for the storage of charge, memristors can possibly

allow for nano-scale low power memory and distributed state storage, as a further extension of NVRAM capabilities. These are currently all hypothetical in terms of time to market. - Crossbar Latches as Transistor Replacements or Augmentors: The hungry power consumption of transistors has been a barrier to both miniaturization and microprocessor controller development. Solidstate memristors can be combined into devices called crossbar latches, which could replace transistors in future computers, taking up a much smaller area. There are difficulties in this area though, although the benefits these could bring are focusing a lot of money in their development. So perhaps the where theres a will, or a dollar, theres a way adage will get these developed.

HISTORY:
1972 chua and his student Sung mo kang published a paper entitled memristive devices and systems in the proceedings of IEEE generalizing the theory of memristors and memristive systems. What is memristane? Short for memory resistance, memristance is a property of an electronic component that lets it remember (or recall) the last resistance it had before being shut off. Electrical resistance that varies according to the history of electrical charge that has flowed through a device .

PHYSICAL ANALOGY
As to my understanding of basic circuit elements, DC circuits are pretty much identical to systems of water pipes, tanks (and valves), where a resistor is analogous to pipe friction and capacitors are analogous to water tanks or the capacitance of a wire. Inductors add a new dimension to electrical circuits not analogous to water systems by storing energy in magnetic fields. I would guess that the memristor might be adding still another dimension by storing energy in some sort of field with which I'm not familiar. Resistor - a two-terminal electronic component designed to oppose an electric current by producing a voltage drop between its terminals in proportion to the current. Inductor-a passive electrical component with significant inductance Capacitor- an electronic device that can store energy in the electric field between a pair of conductors.