Monday, August 13, 2012

Fundamental Issues and Problems in the Realization of Memristors

It appears that some in the scientific community are beginning to catch on to the problems of HP's "memristor" models. A recent preprint was posted in arXiv by Paul Meuffels and Rohit Soni criticizing Leon Chua and HP's memristor framework on the grounds that it does not obey the "no energy discharge property" and is not consistent with principles of thermodynamics (link). Dr. Meuffels co-authored an earlier paper in Applied Physics A pointing out an incorrect assumption about ionic conductivity by the HP Labs group in one of their early memristor papers (link).

Back in 2010 I was invited to speak at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems during a special session on memristors. At the time I noted some of the inconsistencies with HP's and Chua's arguments including that it is not properly considered a fourth fundamental circuit element and it was never missing as claimed by Chua (link). Last year I also posted a paper on arXiv pointing to more realistic dynamic systems models for thin film resistance switching devices (link). Hopefully the efforts of Dr. Meuffels and others will be constructive to move beyond the hype of HP and Chua and open the doors for more realistic models applicable to ReRAM and other resistance switching technologies.