R. Stanley Williams, Hewlett-Packard’s director of the quantum science research group, and his team designed a circuit element that may make it possible to build tiny powerful computers.

The device, called a memristor, would be used to build extremely dense computer memory chips that use far less power than today’s DRAM memory chips. Manufacturers of today’s chips are rapidly reaching the limit on how much smaller chips can be.

The memristor, an electrical resistor with memory properties, may also make it possible to fashion advanced logic circuits, a class of reprogrammable chips known as field programmable gate arrays, that are widely used for rapid prototyping of new circuits and for custom-made chips that need to be manufactured quickly.

Potentially even more tantalizing is the ability of the memristors to store and retrieve a vast array of intermediate values, not just the binary 1s and 0s conventional chips use.

This allows them to function like biological synapses and makes them ideal for many artificial intelligence applications ranging from machine vision to understanding speech.

Independent researchers said that it seemed likely that the memristor might relatively quickly be applied in computer memories, but that other applications could be more challenging.

Typically, technology advances are not adopted unless they offer large advantages in cost or performance over the technologies they are replacing.

"Whether it will be useful for other large-scale applications is unclear at this point," said Wolfgang Porod, director of the Center for Nano Science and Technology at the University of Notre Dame.

The technology should be fairly quickly commercialized, said R. Stanley Williams, director of the quantum science research group at Hewlett-Packard. "This is on a fast track."

The memristor was predicted in 1971 by Leon Chua, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley. There have been hints of an unexplained behavior in the literature for some time, Chua said in a phone interview on Tuesday.

He noted, however, that he had not worked on his idea for several decades and that he was taken by surprise when he was contacted by the Hewlett-Packard researchers several months ago. The advance clearly points the way to a prediction made in 1959 by the physicist Richard Feynman that "there’s plenty of room at the bottom," referring to the possibility of building atomic-scale systems.

The original theoretical work done by Chua was laid out in a paper, "Memristor — The Missing Circuit Element." The paper argued that basic electronic theory required that in addition to the three basic circuit elements — resistors, capacitors and inductors — a fourth element should exist.

The Hewlett-Packard research team titled their paper, "The Missing Memristor Found."

The Hewlett-Packard researchers said that the discovery of the memory properties in tiny, extremely thin spots of titanium dioxide came from a frustrating decade-long hunt for a new class of organic molecules to serve as nano-sized switches. (New York Times)