Unflushed Buffers

Researchers Prove Existence of New Basic Element for Electronic Circuits — ‘Memristor’ from PhysOrg.com

HP today announced that researchers from HP Labs have proven the existence of what had previously been only theorized as the fourth fundamental circuit element in electrical engineering.

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OK I won’t be commenting on other web pages/news articles much but articles like these seem important. I just finished an Advanced Diploma in Electrical Technology last year so I thought I’d finally gotten a decent grasp of the fundamentals. Now someone goes and invents a new one! ARRRGH!!

In all seriousness this is has the potential to make authors rewrite new editions of electronic text books with a new chapter. Although there has been many technological advances by way of the transistor in regards to digital electronics, not much has really changed in the last 50 years and I was able to use old editions of texts to learn my trade (from my own library, I’ve been interested in electronics since I was knee high to a grasshopper). Things have just gotten smaller and more efficient, t’is all.

As a sidenote, it is still difficult to judge where the future of computing and electronics will take us. Sure there will still be electrical devices in the future, but advances are also being made in photonic/optical devices for computing, which have the ability to speed up computer processing much more than electrical (ie electrons) systems. So this may be a new device, and may also find its way into memory systems in our computers in the next decade or so, photonics is a great and challenging field to keep an eye on.

I had to say that, because the idea of a memristor is not knew. The source of the discovery, HP labs, says that

The memristor first appeared in a 1971 paper published by Professor Leon Chua, a distinguished faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department of the University of California Berkeley.

It has just taken this long to figure out how to make a practical use of it.

Really… how many times have you written a hello world!\n source for a new language only to be dissed by the compiler/interpreter with a syntax error because your error correcting keyboard is on the fritz?

OK I’ve written some notes, and occasionally I have problems. This is a new blog to replace versions of the old. There are some articles in the archive I may resurrect from backup but new hard drive, new blog, new purpose.

Probably not going to be updated as regularly as you may like, but who cares, it’s my blog and I’ll not post to it if I want to.