clipped from: news.bbc.co.uk The new components, described by scientists at Hewlett-Packard, are known as "memristors".
The devices were proposed 40 years ago but have only recently been fabricated, the team wrote in the journal Nature.
They have already been used to build novel transistors - tiny switches that are the building blocks of all chips.
"Now we have this type of device we have a broader palette with which to paint our circuits," Professor Stan Williams, one of the team, told the BBC last year.
Total recall
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.