Memristor

About

Originally proposed in the early 70’s, memristors are a new type of passive electronic component (the other three being resistor, capacitor and inductor). It has the unusual electrical property that its resistance changes as a function of the current that has flown through it. Effectively it ‘remembers’ the amount of current it has experienced. This allows it to be used as e.g. a memory device as its resistance will be different depending on whether the current was positive or negative and it will continue to ‘remember’ this even after the current /power has been removed. Other applications include use as a switch and as a tuning component in a circuit and, as it is essentially resistive in nature (i.e. no/lo capacitance and inductance), it can be operated very quickly. The present invention describes a method for the manufacture of such components at very low cost using conventional PCB technology. The components can be manufactured as discrete devices, in arrays (for e.g. memory) or as part of the PCB circuitry itself. The device and the method of manufacture have been submitted as a patent application.