Now We Know Why Apple Bought A Chipmaker

Electronics’ ‘missing link’ found

Memristors were first proposed in 1971 by Professor Leon Chua, a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

They are the “fourth” basic building block of circuits, after capacitors, resistors and inductors.

“I never thought I’d live long enough to see this happen,” Professor Chua told the Associated Press.

“I’m thrilled because it’s almost like vindication. Something I did is not just in my imagination, it’s fundamental.”

The memristors are so called because they have the ability to “remember” the amount of charge that has flowed through them after the power has been switched off.

This could allow researchers to build new kinds of computer memory that would would not require powering up.

Emphasis added by me.

Pay attention to this:

But a computer built with memristors could allow PCs that start up instantly, laptops that retain sessions after the battery dies, or mobile phones that can last for weeks without needing a charge.

“If you turn on your computer it will come up instantly where it was when you turned it off,” Professor Williams told Reuters.

“That is a very interesting potential application, and one that is very realistic.”

Emphasis added by me.

Here is the key bit:

However, according to some, it may be some time before the device is widely used.

“Even to consider an alternative to the transistor is anathema to many device engineers, and the memristor concept will have a steep slope to climb towards acceptance,” wrote Drs James Tour and Tao Heare of Rice University, Houston, in an accompanying article in Nature.

They said that some in the electronics industry would only accept the use of memristors “after the demonstration of a well-functioning, large-scale array of these densely packed devices”.

“When that happens, the race towards smaller devices will proceed at full steam.”

Emphasis added by me.

So there are the Bright People of Apple.

They look around the industry and see how everyone is able to — put it mildly — clone what they do.

Software only provides a brief edge, a narrow buffer from the competition.

Hardware has basically become the same set of commodity components that everyone else uses. So that doesn’t provide any edge at all.

But Apple’s Bright People are the brightest of the bright. They know how to look beyond what everyone else accepts.

And so they find out about this research well before it makes its way into the popular press and they convince Steve Jobs that this is the hardware edge Apple has been seeking. They show him all the evidence that proves no one will touch this until someone points the way.

And by that time, the hardware edge they’ll have is at least two-to-five years ahead of everyone else.

For the doubters out there: Apple co-created the PowerPC chip. These are specialists.

Expect memristors in an upcoming Apple device.

And it will be the first device to have it!

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