Gaurav Gandhi
Some basic electronics first- There are 3 basic circuit elements: Resistor, Capacitor and an Inductor. In 1971, Leon Chua postulated a fourth member, a memristor (memory resistor) which was observed for the firs time in 2008 by HP Labs. Research intensified in the area and amidst the buzz, two Indian researchers in Delhi had a few things brewing over a cup of coffee.
Varun Aggarwal
Gaurav Gandhi, a Delhi University graduate who got his PhD from Pazmany Peter Catholic University, Budapest had recently returned from the Second Memristor and Memristive Symposium at Berkeley. And his mate, Varun Aggarwal had finished his masters in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While on the topic of Memristors, they both got interested about the developments in the field.
Cat Whiskers
Varun had followed Jagadish Chandra Bose’s work over the years and Gaurav had a background in the space. Combining their expertise, they started up mLabs with Gaurav taking up a full time role while Varun came on board as an advisor. Under the keen eye of the man, Leon Chua himself, mLabs was setup in 2010 to do cutting edge R&D on memristors.
3 years of research and the team was able to show that Memristors can be observed at any scale. They need not be present at micro or nano levels. The video shows the making of one:
So, what are the practical applications of the Memristor?
“One of the most prevalent applications of Memristors is design of highly dense memories. They are slated to replace flash memories in due course. Apart from this, they can be used to build highly efficient computer architectures (including cross bar architecture) and research shows that they can be used to emulate the neuron and thus the brain. Since the component was first observed very recently, in 2008, it is a hot field of research with new applications coming out every day.”
Completely bootstrapped, the Delhi based team which consists of around 10 interns from various colleges and mLabs currently putting finishing touches to the product before it is out in the market for sale. This is expected to happen in a month’s time.
More of their work on mLabs.