Note: This posting summarizes some arguments I presented at the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Circuits and Systems. The complete presentation is available at this link.

In an earlier posting I presented arguments of why the idea of the memristor as a fourth fundamental circuit element is likely to be wrong. However, regardless of whether or not the memristor is considered as a fundamental circuit element, one may ask if it is technically correct to say that the researchers from HPLabs actually did discover a memristor. Read the rest of this entry »

Note: This posting summarizes some arguments I presented at the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Circuits and Systems. The complete presentation is available at this link.

Much of the recent interest in HP’s finding the “missing” memristor has been based on the presumption that it is correctly interpreted as the “4^th fundamental circuit element” after the resistor, capacitor, and inductor. The original argument from Leon Chua was that there were four ways to link the variables of charge and current to the variables of flux-linkage and voltage. The resistor, capacitor, and inductor represent three ways to link these variables while the memristor was postulated as representing the “missing” link connecting charge and flux-linkage. This may seem like a reasonable argument at first glance but it is not without flaws. Read the rest of this entry »

In the past few years a lot of attention has been directed to “memristors” as a new type of memory cell and as a new component for neuromorphic electronic designs. However, currently most proposed neuromorphic designs do not yet use the 2-terminal memristive devices promoted by Leon Chua and HP but rather use more conventional electronic circuit components such as the floating gate memory cells used in Flash memory. Read the rest of this entry »

Leo Chua gave one of his brilliant talks on May 21, 2010 at the ICCNS 2010 conference at the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems. Just to be sure you get the magnitude of the event: Leon Chua is the first to theorize the existence of memristors with his paper “Memristor: The Missing Circuit Element” on IEEE TRANSACTIONS on Circuit Theory, published in September 1971. Read the rest of this entry »