The brainiacs at H.P. think they’ve discovered a way to replace transistors with technology that will shrink chips to the atomic scale. Emphasis on “brain.”They’re even throwing around impressive hyperbole, saying, as electrical engineer Dr. Leon O. Chua did, that “we have the right stuff now to build real brains.” Bwah? Real brains?Sort of. The “stuff” is called a memristor, and truth be told Dr. Chua actually conceived the idea way back in the Digital Dark Age known as 1971 seriously, there was no Facebook. It was only in 2008, however, that an H.P. lab at UC Berkeley was able to implement the technology and compare the result to how a human brain operates. Turns out they’re similar, Dr. Chua said, with our organic synapses and gray matter behaving very much like his artificial memristors.

via Brain-Like Memristors Could Revolutionize Memory Chips at the Atomic Level.