"Missing link of electronics" could make brain-like computers

Europe Sun (ANI) Tuesday 16th March, 2010

Reports indicate that a US military-funded project is trying to use the memristor, the "missing link of electronics", to make brain-like computers, which would bring neural computing closer to reality.

It seems the so-called memristor can behave uncannily like the junctions between neurons in the brain.

A memristor is a device that, like a resistor, opposes the passage of current. But memristors also have a memory.

The resistance of a memristor at any moment depends on the last voltage it experienced, so its behaviour can be used to recall past voltages.

Now, memristors are being used in a US military-funded project trying to make brain-like computers, Wei Lu, who led the team at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor that demonstrated the new behaviour, told New Scientist.

The memristor's existence was predicted in 1971, when Leon Chua of the University of California, Berkeley, spotted a gap in the capabilities of basic electrical components.

But it was not until 2008 that Stanley Williams at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California, made the first memristor from a speck of titanium dioxide, the pigment in most white paint.

The race to use memristors in computing has been on ever since, with brain-like computers one of the potential applications.

Page 1 of 3 | Next