In 1971, electrical engineering professor Leon Chua proposed a theoretical basic electronics component called a memristor. In 2008, Hewlett Packard brought the memristor out of theory and into the real world. And today, HP announced that they have finally proven that they can build devices that use memristors, instead of the transistors that enable all current computer chips. Since memristors can store and process data simultaneously, stack on top of one another in a 3-D fashion, and function at much smaller sizes than a transistor, this advance could increase the power and memory of computers to nearly unimaginable proportions within only a couple of years.
