Hewlett-Packard scientists have designed a simple circuit element, the memrister, that they believe will make it possible to build tiny powerful computers that could imitate biological functions.

The memristor would be used to build extremely dense computer memory chips that use far less power than today’s DRAM memory chips, and should be fairly quickly commercialized, said R. Stanley Williams, director of the quantum science research group at Hewlett-Packard.

Memristors could also store and retrieve a vast array of intermediate values, not just the binary 1s and 0s conventional chips use. This allows them to function like biological synapses and makes them ideal for many artificial intelligence applications ranging from machine vision to understanding speech.

The Hewlett-Packard team has successfully created working circuits based on memristors that are as small as 15 nanometers. Ultimately, it will be possible to make memristors as small as about four nanometers, Mr. Williams said. In contrast, the smallest components in today’s semiconductors are 45 nanometers, and the industry currently does not see a way to shrink those devices below about 20 nanometers.