The Memristor

EDIT: Wikipedia had a good page already about it which clarified a lot, I have made corrections to my post that has been up for only a few minutes.

If this article about the memristor, a new fundamental electric circruit component is any good, then some radical new things are coming up in electronics. It’s a basic building block there together with the resistor, capacitor and coil.

The memristor changes it’s voltage according to current.

To paraphrase, the coil has voltage in response to changes in current through it, the capacitor produces current in changing voltage over it and the resistor has a voltage depending on current through it, so the memristor is sort of a “missing piece” that has been theorized since the sixties and also depends on some new apparently more fundamentally correct ways of thinking about electric circuits. Apparently one should not fundamentally think about voltage (potential difference between two points, how much do the electrons in here want to go over there) and current (charge flow, ie how many electrons per second) but flux (how many electrons have flowed through this component) and charge (simplified a lot, how many electrons are in this component).

I’m not an electrical engineer and it’s been a while since I’ve had to do any analog stuff, so this post comes with a heavy disclaimer: it might have significant errors.

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