He called it “memristor”, a portmanteau of the words memory and resistor.
It took 37 years for our engineering abilities to catch up with that idea: the first memristor was built by Hewlett Packard in 2008.
And today, many researchers believe it could spark a revolution in computing.
From electrons to ions
Simply put, the memristor could mean the end of electronics as we know it and the beginning of a new era called “ionics”.
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Now that we have that capability to manufacture it, the “missing fourth element” of electronics — despite its less than catchy name — might be the key to many further human discoveries.
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