The Memristor
02. May 2008 
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There’s a new (ackwardly named) basic circuit element that relates magnetic flux with charge. It joins the inductor, the capacitor and the resistor as the fundamental basic building blocks of electric circuits. According to arstechnica, once you dive into the math, it actually boils down to a variable resistance as a function of the charge passed through it. They also speculate that transistors based on memristors will be able to scale down well enough that they put off the demise of moore’s law well into the forseeable future. Also, the article has some details on a solid state storage device by HP with higher data density than flash with DRAM latency. That could be interesting as it could allow the merger of “main memory” (RAM) and “secondary storage” (hard disk). The integration of all that stuff into the CPU much like your garden variety microcontroller does today would be cool too.