Parasitic Effects on Memristor Dynamics

Abstract

In this paper, we show that parasitic elements have a significant effect on the dynamics of memristor circuits. We first show that certain [Formula: see text]-terminal elements such as memristors, memcapacitors, and meminductors can be used as nonvolatile memories, if the principle of conservation of state variables hold by open-circuiting, or short-circuiting, their terminals. We also show that a passive memristor with a strictly-increasing constitutive relation will eventually lose its stored flux when we switch off the power if there is a parasitic capacitance across the memristor. Similarly, a memcapacitor (resp., meminductor) with a positive memcapacitance (resp., meminductance) will eventually lose their stored physical states when we switch off the power, if it is connected to a parasitic resistance. We then show that the discontinuous jump that circuit engineers assumed to occur at impasse points of memristor circuits contradicts the principles of conservation of charge and flux at the time of the discontinuous jump. A parasitic element can be used to break an impasse point, resulting in the emergence of a continuous oscillation in the circuit. We also define a distance, a diameter, and a dimension, for each circuit element in order to measure the complexity order of the parasitic elements. They can be used to find higher-order parasitic elements which can break impasse points. Furthermore, we derived a memristor-based Chua’s circuit from a three-element circuit containing a memristor by connecting two parasitic memcapacitances to break the impasse points. We finally show that a higher-order parasitic element can be used for breaking the impasse points on two-dimensional and three-dimensional constrained spaces.