RRAM

clipped from arxivblog.com The four passive components of electronics are the resistor, capacitor, inductor and the memristor, which was discovered only a few months ago. Now Tom Driscoll and buddies at the University of California, San Diego have shown how memristors could work as low cost, high density memory. It turns out that a thin film of vanadium oxide acts like a memrister when a current is passed through it. At a certain critical temperature, the current triggers a phase change in the film, turning it from an insulator to a metal-like conductor. And that significantly changes it’s resistance in a way that can be measured for hours afterwards. In effect, the resistor stores a singe bit of information. Driscoll calls it resistive random access memory or RRAM, in which information is stored in the form of material resistance, which can be changed by an applied voltage .