Invited Paper NS+NC-TuM1
The Missing Memristor Found: A Fundamental Element for Nanoelectronic Circuits

Tuesday, October 21, 2008, 8:00 am, Room 311

In 1971, Prof. Leon Chua of the UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering Department predicted from symmetry arguments for non-linear circuits that there should be a fourth fundamental passive circuit element to complement the capacitor, resistor and inductor. He called this element a memristor, a contraction for 'memory resistor', and showed that if it existed, it would have a great many interesting and useful properties. However, no one was able to construct such an element, so the idea faded away. On May 1 of this year, we announced that we had 'found' the missing memristor, and that the element we built indeed had the properties predicted by Chua when operated within a restricted parameter range. In this talk, I will describe the discovery of the memristor, what its properties are, how it is made, and how we have used it in a variety of hybrid integrated circuits with transistors, including nonvolatile random access memories and synaptic or "brain-like" circuits.