SAN FRANCISCO — Hewlett-Packard said Tuesday that it would commercialize a new computer memory technology with Hynix, the South Korean chip maker.

Hynix’s agreement to build computer memories using a technology H.P. scientists developed called memristors indicates that more computer memory will be packed in even smaller devices in the second half of this decade. The two companies said the memristors will be commercially available in about three years.

To date, the memristor’s most likely application is for dense nonvolatile memories, which is what is used in flash memory cards for products like cameras and PCs. It is not out of the question, however, that it might play a role in other kinds of chips, including microprocessors, in the future.

The agreement to build the memory chips validates the work of Leon O. Chua, a University of California, Berkeley, electrical engineering professor. In 1971, he proposed a fourth basic circuit element (the other three are the resistor, capacitor and inductor) and called it a memristor, or memory resistor, as a simpler alternative to transistors. The idea languished for many years before a team of H.P. researchers found a way to use it in 2006. Since then, memristors have attracted industrial, academic and military interest, but have not gone beyond being laboratory curiosities.