"It works like a real synapse but it's an organic electronic device that can be engineered," said Alberto Salleo, associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford and senior author of the paper. "It's an entirely new family of devices because this type of architecture has not been shown before. For many key metrics, it also performs better than anything that's been done before with inorganics."

It mimics the way synapses in the brain learn through the signals that cross them. This is a significant energy savings over traditional computing, which involves separately processing information and then storing it into memory. Here, the processing creates the memory.