Justin Mullins is the author of a nice post on the Memristor, appeard on 7/8/2009 on New Scientist. It does a nice job in describing the story of the memristor, from his theoretical discovery in 1971 by Leon Chua at the University of California, Berkeley, to his utilization by Stan Williams and Greg Snider at the HP Labs in Palo Alto, to the implementation of neural models, which involves the department that hosts the Neurdons!…

I would like to highlight a passage from the article: “The most immediate potential use is as a powerful replacement for flash memory – the kind used in applications that require quick writing and rewriting capabilities, such as in cameras and USB memory sticks. Like flash memory, memristive memory can only be written 10,000 times or so before the constant atomic movements within the device cause it to break down. That makes it unsuitable for computer memories. Still, Williams believes it will be possible to improve the durability of memristors. Then, he says, they could be just the thing for a superfast random access memory (RAM), the working memory that computers use to store data on the fly, and ultimately even for hard drives.”

If things go as planned, as we all hope, memristors will be widely available in consumer electronics. This makes building models based on this technology even more appealing. The analogy with the brain is too tempting to be overlooked: whereas classical computers distinguish between CPU and memory, in memirstors, as in the brain, the memory IS the processor.