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Abstract for Seminar
An acronym for ''memory resistor'', the memristor was first postulated in 1971 but did not see its light of day until only recently when Hewlett Packard published in the Journal Nature a working titanium-dioxide memristor smaller in size than the smallest known virus. Since memristors can store information without a battery, this invention has generated immense woldwide attention in view of the economic impact of a disruptive technology that would replace flash memories, DRAMs, and hard drives - - currently a 150 billion dollar industry. This lecture will give an elementary introduction on the memristor and reveals the origin of its magical ''non-volatile'' memory. It will also show why the memristor is the 4th basic circuit element, on par with the resistor, inductor, and the capacitor. It will also demonstrate that the significance of the memristor transcends economics by virtue of the recent discovery that both the ''synapses'' and the ''axons'' in our brain can be emulated by memristors. This fundamental result shows that it is impossible to build a brain-like computer without using memristors. It follows that the memristor is the holy grail for building portable, low-power, and intelligent brain-like machines.
Leon Ong Chua is an IEEE Fellow and a professor in the electrical engineering and computer sciences department at the University of California, Berkeley, which he joined in 1971. Dr. Leon O. Chua is recognized for his contributions to nonlinear circuit theory and Cellular neural network (CNN). He is also the inventor and namesake of Chua's circuit and was the first to conceive the theories behind, and postulate the existence of, the memristor. Thirty-seven years after he predicted its existence, a working solid-state memristor was created by a team led by R. Stanley Williams at Hewlett Packard.