In the July '08 issue, we reported the invention of the memristor at Hewlett-Packard Labs which they called the "fourth basic circuit element," along with resistors, capacitors, and inductors. At the time, it was thought to mainly provide a possible way to replace DRAMs with static ICs to lower power consumption and eliminate the boot-up process. However, HP recently announced that the concept has even more importance than originally believed. They have discovered that the device- in addition to use in memory storage- can aerform logic functions. This implies that a memristor circuit could be used to perform computations in the device where the data is stored, thus eliminating the need for a CPU altogether.
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