Have we learned nothing from the Terminator movies?

Earlier this week HP announced that they had successfully built a memristor, a device that some are calling the fourth basic building block of electronics. This devices is a type of nanometer scale switch that remembers whether it was on or off after power is removed which can be used to construct non-volatile memory and more powerful processors.

You may dimly recall circuit diagrams from your middle school science class; those little boxes with a battery on one end and a lightbulb on the other. Ring any bells? To an electrical engineer, the battery is a capacitor—a device for storing electric charge—and the lightbulb is a resistor—an obstacle to electric current. Until now, engineers have had only one other basic element to work with—the inductor, which turns current into a magnetic field.

In 1971 researcher Leon Chua of the University of California, Berkeley, noticed a gap in that list. Circuit elements express relationships between pairs of the four electromagnetic quantities of charge, current, voltage and magnetic flux. Missing was a link between charge and flux. Chua dubbed this missing link the memristor and created a crude example to demonstrate its key property: it becomes more or less resistive (less or more conductive) depending on the amount of charge that had flowed through it.

Physicist Stanley Williams of HP Labs says that after a colleague brought Chua's work to his attention, he saw that it would explain a variety of odd behaviors in electronic devices that his group and other nanotech researchers had built over the years. His "brain jolt" came, he says, when he realized that "to make a pure memristor you have to build it so as to isolate this memory function."

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Researchers believe the discovery will pave the way for instant-on PCs, more energy-efficient computers, and new analog computers that can process and associate information in a manner similar to that of the human brain.

According to R. Stanley Williams, one of four researchers at HP Labs' Information and Quantum Systems Lab who made the discovery, the most interesting characteristic of a memristor device is that it remembers the amount of charge that flows through it.

Indeed, Chua's original idea was that the resistance of a memristor would depend upon how much charge has gone through the device. In other words, you can flow the charge in one direction and the resistance will increase. If you push the charge in the opposite direction it will decrease. Put simply, the resistance of the devices at any point in time is a function of history of the device –- or how much charge went through it either forwards or backwards. That simple idea, now that it has been proven, will have profound effect on computing and computer science.

"Part of what's going to come out of this is something none of us can imagine yet," says Williams. "But what we can imagine in and of itself is actually pretty cool."

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Scientists also envision building other types of circuits in which the memristor would be used as an analog device.

Indeed, Leon himself noted the similarity between his own predictions of the properties for a memristor and what was then known about synapses in the brain. One of his suggestions was that you could perhaps do some type of neuronal computing using memristors. HP Labs thinks that's actually a very good idea.

"Building an analog computer in which you don't use 1s and 0s and instead use essentially all shades of gray in between is one of the things we're already working on," says Williams. These computers could do the types of things that digital computers aren't very good at –- like making decisions, determining that one thing is larger than another, or even learning.

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As you may recall Skynet and the Terminators are neural-net based artifical intelligences capable of learning at a geometric wait. Sounds like the "analog" computers described above right?

Be afraid! Be very afraid!

Fortunately we may be safe for a while longer:

Whether industry will adopt it remains to be seen. In an editorial accompanying the paper, nanotech researchers James Tour and Tao He of Rice University in Houston note that "even to consider an alternative to the transistor is anathema to many device engineers, and the memristor concept will have a steep slope to climb towards acceptance."

Although...

If it leads to Terminators like this (cute nekkid girl terminators that is) it might be worthwhile.