Monday, August 27, 2018

New memristor criticism

A paper was published last month in Nature's Scientific Reports from Isaac Abraham of Intel offering some criticism of the "memristor" concept as a fundamental circuit element.


It has been over 10 years since researchers from Hewlett-Packard first claimed to have made a scientific breakthrough by discovering what had previously been proposed to be a missing fourth "fundamental" circuit element called the "memristor." Originally, I had been a big supporter of the concept and had even been invited to speak at a memristor symposium at Berkeley in 2008 where I met Leon Chua, Stan Williams, and several other researchers in ReRAM and non-linear circuit theory. However, as I studied more about the memristor several problems and inconsistencies became apparent. In 2010 I was invited to speak at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS 2010) in Paris where I tried to point out these problems. It seemed to go well but shortly thereafter the technical program chair of ISCAS 2010 (Wouter Serdjin) sent a few e-mails to my university adviser informing that there was a "negative reaction" to my presentation by an unnamed person in the audience. Luckily, I had already graduated the previous semester. My ISCAS 2010 paper was then removed from IEEE Xplore.

Obviously, I'm glad to finally see some criticism appearing in the scientific literature. Advancement in science and technology depends on criticism. Particularly of those already in power. It shouldn't have taken 10 years though.

My other blog may be of interest providing a timeline of my views on the "memristor" - http://nanomorphware.blogspot.com/