Memristor the new circuit paradigm? substituting Moore's law?

A new element is accidentally discovered two years ago in HP lab. However the element hypothesis is being presented 30 years ago by Leon Chua, A prof from UC Berkeley . The discovery of new element or so call 4th basic electrical element is comparable to the discovery of capacitor, resistor and inductor in 18th-19th century. So what is memristor? memristor stand for memory resistor which means a resistor that has memory. WTF? a resistor that has memory? kidding man...but this is all true.

Just think of water flow as current and water pipe as resistor. When water pipe diameter get narrower, obstacle to water flow increases. Same relation apply to current and resistance. For the convention circuit history, the pipe has fix diameter. But now, a memristor is a pipe that changes diameter with the amount and direction of the water flow. When water flow in one direction, the pipe expands (less resistive) but when water send in opposite direction, the pipe shrinks ( more resistive). Somemore memristor can remember the diameter when water last went through. So by turn on and turn off voltage apply, memristor can remember the previous resistance.


Sound like, u can build a memory circuit from memristor right? by construct it in cross bar architecture, you can build a memory circuit and store state (1 or 0). From the data presented, the turn on/off resistance ratio is 1000:1 compare to 10000:1 of convention transistor. Pretty good switching. Memristor can be constructed in such way that titanium oxide is sandwiched by two titanium wires, one in vertical and the other in horizontal. titanium oxide contains two layers, bottom layer is TiO2 which is a perfect titanium oxide while top layer is TiO2-x, which has defection of oxygen in it. A perfect TiO2 acts as insulator, while defection TiO2-x acts as conducting layer. If positive voltage is applied on top titanium wire, O+ in TiO2-x layer is repelled from wire. Hence increase the conducting layer and reduce resistance. reverse behavior applied if negative voltage is applied.

This is a revolution discovery in the mid th of Moore's law bottle-neck. 45nm feature size which has 200 size of atom, eventually will meet its channel length of 1 atom size. Memristor size can be as small as just few nm size. More work need to be done on the resistance on/off ratio to have better performance than convention transistor.