Electronics giant Hewlett-Packard and the world's second-largest memory chip maker Hynix are teaming up to mass produce memristors for portable devices and computers by 2013.

Memristors or resistors with memory are 10 times faster and uses 10 times less power than Flash memory chips commonly used in portable digital devices. The device also has greater memory storage and requires less space making it ideal as memory chips and even hard drives.

Phones, cameras and ultimately PCs will have longer battery life with the use of memristors, according to Stan Williams, director of the Information & Quantum Systems Lab at HP.
HP will call its memristors Resistive Random Access Memory or ReRAM.

HP developed the first prototype of the memristor in 2008.

Memristors were first mentioned in 1971. Leon Chua, then a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, called it the fourth basic element in electronics after the capacitor, resistor and inductor.