The case for rejecting the memristor as a fundamental circuit element

Isaac Abraham

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-29394-7

Abstract

The memory resistor with the moniker memristor was a harmless postulate in 1971. Since 2008 a device that claims to be the memristor is on the prowl, seeking recognition as a fundamental circuit element, sometimes wanting electronics textbooks to be rewritten, always promising remarkable digital, analog and neuromorphic computing possibilities. A systematic discussion about the fundamental nature of the device is almost absent within the memristor community. Advocates use incomplete constitutive relationships, ignore concepts of activity/passivity and aver that nonlinearity is central to their case. Few researchers have examined these claims. Our report investigates the assertion that the memristor is a fundamental passive circuit element, from the fresh perspective that electrical engineering is the science of charge management. We demonstrate with a periodic table of fundamental elements that the 2008 memristor is not the 1971 postulate and neither of them is fundamental. The ideal memristor is an unphysical active device and any physically realizable memristor is a nonlinear composition of resistors with active hysteresis. We also show that there exists only three fundamental passive circuit elements.

Highlights

The basic question of the “missing circuit element” is whether we can we have a new passive element that cannot be made from the combination of existing passive elements
A frequent situation in EE is that, in a non-zero electrical field, a charge is separated from its reference plane by applying some energy
A frequent situation is for an object to move with a constant velocity in a viscous media, implying friction and energy dissipation

Summary

Introduction

The basic question of the “missing circuit element” is whether we can we have a new passive element that cannot be made from the combination of existing passive elements. A frequent situation in EE is that, in a non-zero electrical field, a charge is separated from its reference plane by applying some energy. This results in a static charge placed at some location, with a potential. Capacitance C is the phenomenological constant with the unit of farad (F) that translates charge to voltage The equivalent case is to flow through an element with non-zero electrical field, in this case a resistor.

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