inductor

* The simplest inductor is a coil of wire.

The inductor and capacitors used to make the low pass filters can be much smaller for MHz frequencies.

I'd like some more details; they must be doing something very novel if they are eliminating the inductor.

AC also makes it much easier to transform voltage levels - you just use an inductor or two. DC requires relatively complex electronics.

* The horseshoe inductor is just a spiral inductor that only has one loop, and is consequently shaped like a horseshoe.

* An inductor is a primitive circuit element, like a resistor or capacitor.

I haven't made any calculations but I would expect the battery to be bigger and of greater weight than a sufficient inductor.

If you just build a traditional switching converter with a capacitor instead of an inductor, you end up with less than 50% efficiency.

This looks to me like a cultural problem, not only in the IT sector but in all sectors where high performance is a measurably inductor to profit.

It's long been standard practice with tantalum filter capacitors to feed them through an inductor or at least a resistor to prevent inrush current failures.

> Historically, electrical circuits were crafted with three basic building blocks: the capacitor, the resistor, and the inductor.

We get it by taking the Laplace transform of the differential equation that defines the relationship between current and voltage in a capacitor or inductor.

An ideal inductor maintains the relationship V = L x dI/dt, where V is the voltage across the 2 terminals of the inductor, I is the current through the inductor, and L is the inductance.

That's an effect that can't be duplicated by any circuit combination of resistors, capacitors, and inductors, which is why the memristor qualifies as a fundamental circuit element.

I believe what you meant to say is that the reasoning for the fourth element is weak, as the memristor is claimed to be the fourth electrical engineering component discovered, after: resistor, capacitor and inductor.

There's no general answer for this; an inductor is sometimes there to "insist on keeping the current to a constant value", sometimes it's there to exhibit a greater impedance to high-frequency signals, therefore allowing -- along with the capacitor over there -- only signals of a certain narrow frequency band to pass.