I loves me some memristors. If you’re not familiar with a memristor, it’s basically a non-volatile transistor, i.e. it “remembers” its electrical resistance even after losing power. It basically makes a regular transistor look like a slacker.
It was first postulated in the early 70s, but no one actually made a working one until HP in 2008.
Now researchers have demonstrated making memristors on atomic sheet of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD), placed between two common metal electrodes. Aside from the advances in making really thin memristors, what’s exciting is that the non-volatile resistance was observable across a variety of factors, including device temperatures, sheet areas, compliance current, voltage sweep rate, and layer thickness. This at leasts indicates that it might make it out of the lab and into production at some point.
Thanks to Ray Lucchesi for pointing out this exciting research. Make sure to check out his post, where he digs into potential applications in storage, compute and software-defined radios.
Ray Lucchesi comments:
Prior to this research, it was believed that such resistance switching could not be accomplished with single atomic, sub-nanometre (0.7nm) sized, sheet of material
Read more at: Atomristors, a new single (atomic) layer memristor
