HP says new device could revolutionize chips

Hewlett-Packard scientists on Thursday will report advances demonstrating significant progress in the design of a new class of diminutive switches capable of replacing transistors, as computer chips shrink toward the atomic scale.
The devices, known as memristors, or memory resistors, were first conceived in 1971 by Leon O. Chua, an electrical engineer at the University of California at Berkeley, but they were not put in effect until 2008, at the HP lab here in Palo Alto, Calif.
They are simpler than today's semiconducting transistors, can store information, even in the absence of an electrical current and, according to the new report in Nature, can be used for both data processing and storage applications.

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