The memristor and the transistor are complimentary. "Memristors are a supercharger for a transistor-integrated circuit," Williams said in an interview. "All of the circuits we're building now are hybrids with both transistors and memristors."

This new hybrid design, which could be used in PCs and small electronic devices like smart phones, could change the basic chip architecture. Today, memory and computing functions are done separately on a chip, so data has to be transferred between the two - and that is costly in terms of computing time and energy used.

"It's really a very different type of process," said Williams. "Instead of having to move data between a memory chip and a logic chip, you could just send your program to where the data is in the memory, perform the computation locally and then just send the data out."

Williams noted that he expects to see memristors used for memory in devices in three years. While it would compete with Flash memory, it would have more memory, use less power and be a lot faster.

"We are hoping that in three years to have a memristor-based circuit that will have more than twice the amount of storage as a flash memory chip will have three years from now -- and at the same time, have that chip be 10 times faster than a flash memory chip."