The device, named "memristor", has electronic properties that make it suitable for both for computing and for faster, denser memory, the researchers said and claimed that the chip can be made much more cheaply, using current semiconductor techniques.
The name is a portmanteau of memory and resistor, because its resistance changes depending on how much current has passed through it; it "remembers" that value even after power is turned off, the researchers said.
"We're reaching the limits of what we can do with flash memory in terms of increasing the storage density, and it's also relatively high power and not as fast as we would like," lead researcher Anthony Kenyon of University College London was quoted by the BBC News as saying.
However, the researchers are still working to get memristor devices out of the lab and into consumer electronics.
Hewlett- Packard, whose engineers demonstrated the first working memristor, already have plans to bring early memristor designs to market.
Current designs employ expensive or exotic materials, but a real memristor revolution could hinge on making them compatible with existing semiconductor technology, based overwhelmingly on silicon.
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That would make them easy and cheap to integrate into existing manufacturing techniques, the researchers said.
Such attempts have been made before, but previous devices reported in 2010 were fairly delicate and worked only under vacuum.
Now, Kenyon and his team have stumbled across a better way to make silicon memristors. MORE