The memristor — short for memory resistor – could make it possible to develop far more energy-efficient computing systems with memories that retain information even after the power is off, so there’s no wait for the system to boot up after turning the computer on. It may even be possible to create systems with some of the pattern-matching abilities of the human brain.
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By providing a mathematical model for the physics of a memristor, the team makes possible for engineers to develop integrated circuit designs that take advantage of its ability to retain information.

“This opens up a whole new door in thinking about how chips could be designed and operated,” Williams says.

Engineers could, for example, develop a new kind of computer memory that would supplement and eventually replace today’s commonly used dynamic random access memory (D-RAM). Computers using conventional D-RAM lack the ability to retain information once they are turned off. When power is restored to a D-RAM-based computer, a slow, energy-consuming “boot-up” process is necessary to retrieve data stored on a magnetic disk required to run the system.