Memristor - Historical Timeline

Historical Timeline

1808

Sir Humphry Davy is claimed to have performed the first experiments showing the effects of a memristor.

1971

Leon Chua, a professor at UC Berkeley, postulated a new two-terminal circuit element characterized by a relationship between charge and flux linkage as a fourth fundamental circuit element in the article "Memristor-the Missing Circuit Element" published in IEEE Transactions on Circuit Theory.

1976

Chua and his student Sung Mo Kang published a paper entitled "Memristive Devices and Systems" in the Proceedings of the IEEE generalizing the theory of memristors and memristive systems including a property of zero crossing in the Lissajous curve characterizing current vs. voltage behavior.

2007

(April 10) Gregory Snider of HP Labs received U.S. Patent 7,203,789 (assigned to Hewlett-Packard), describing implementations of 2-terminal resistance switches similar to memristors in reconfigurable computing architectures.

(August 10) Snider published the article "Self-organized computation with unreliable, memristive nanodevices" in the Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology discussing memristive nanodevices useful to pattern recognition and reconfigurable circuit architectures.

2008

(April 15) Snider received U.S. Patent 7,359,888(assigned to Hewlett-Packard) including basic claims to a nanoscale 2-terminal resistance switch crossbar array formed as a neural network.

(May 1) Dmitri Strukov, Gregory Snider, Duncan Stewart, and Stan Williams, of HP Labs, publish an article in Nature "The missing memristor found" identifying a link between the 2-terminal resistance switching behavior found in nanoscale systems and Leon Chua's memristor.

(July 7) Victor Erokhin and M.P. Fontana claim to have developed a polymeric memristor before the titanium dioxide memristor of Stan Williams group in the article "Electrochemically controlled polymeric device: a memristor (and more) found two years ago".

(July 15) J. Joshua Yang, Matthew D. Pickett, Xuema Li, Douglas A. A. Ohlberg, Duncan R. Stewart and R. Stanley Williams published an article in Nature Nanotechnology "Memristive switching mechanism for metal/oxide/metal nano-devices" demonstrating the memristive switching behavior and mechanism in nanodevices.

(September 14–16) Blaise Mouttet, a graduate student at George Mason University, presented a paper entitled "Proposal for Memristors in Signal Processing" at Nano-Net 2008, a nanotechnology conference in Boston.

(September 23) Yu V. Pershin and M. Di Ventra of University of California, San Diego published "Spin memristive systems: Spin memory effects in semiconductor spintronics" in Physical Review Letters noting memristive behavior in spintronics.

(October 22) Yu V. Pershin, S. La Fontaine, M. Di Ventra published "Memristive model of amoeba's learning" identifying memristive behavior in amoeba's learning.

(October 28) Duncan Stewart, Patricia Beck, and Doug Ohlberg, researchers at HP Labs, received U.S. Patent 7,443,711 (assigned to Hewlett-Packard) including basic patent claims to a tunable nanoscale 2-terminal resistance switch.

(November 21) Chua, Stan Williams, Snider, Rainer Waser, Wolfgang Porod, Massimiliano Di Ventra, and Mouttet spoke at a Symposium on Memristors and Memristive Systems held at University of California, Berkeley. Discussion included the theoretical foundations of memristors and memristive systems and the prospects of memristors for RRAM and neuromorphic electronic architectures.

2009

(January 21) Sung Hyun Jo, Kuk-Hwan Kim, and Wei Lu of the University of Michigan published "High-Density Crossbar Arrays Based on a Si Memristive System" inNanoLetters, which detailed an amorphous silicon based memristive material capable of being integrated with CMOS devices.

(January 23) Di Ventra, Pershin and Chua submitted "Circuit elements with memory: memristors, memcapacitors and meminductors" to arXiv. which extended the notion of memristive systems to capacitive and inductive elements, namely capacitors and inductors whose properties depend on the state and history of the system.

(February 10) HP Labs published "A hybrid nanomemristor/transistor logic circuit capable of self-programming" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

(May 1) An article is published "Nanoparticle Assemblies as Memristors" in NanoLetters, describing a newly discovered memristor material based on magnetite nanoparticles and proposing an extended memristor model including both time-dependent resistance and time-dependent capacitance.

(May 19) Yuriy Pershin and Massimiliano Di Ventra published a preliminary article in Nature Precedings entitled "Experimental demonstration of associative memory with memristive neural networks" in which a memristor emulator demonstrated properties of a neural synapse.

(June 2) A. Delgado published "Input Output Linearization of Memristive Systems" in the Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE Nanotechnology Materials and Devices Conference; demonstrating that feedback linearization can be applied to the memristor producing a linear device.

(June 3) Scientists at NIST published "A Flexible Solution-Processed Memristor" in IEEE Electron Device Letters. NIST's memristor is based on TiO2 like HPLabs', but is fabricated using a less expensive room temperature deposition process and deposits the memristive material on flexible polymer sheets with potential applications as components of biosensors or radio-frequency identification (RFID).

(July 13) At the 2nd International Multi-Conference on Engineering and Technological Innovation, Mouttet described a memristor-based pattern recognition circuit performing an analog variation of the exclusive nor function. The circuit architecture was proposed as a way to circumvent Von Neumann's bottleneck for processors used in robotic control systems.

(August 4) The physical realization of an electrically modifiable array of memristive neural synapses was achieved by researchers at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology as reported in Nanotechnology.

(September 17) Memristive behavior of magnetic tunnel junctions was reported by researchers from the Bielefeld University, Germany. A combination of resistive and magnetoresistive switching produced a second order memristive device. The state variables are the state of the insulating layer (oxygen vacancy positions) and the state of the magnetic electrodes (the relative orientation of the magnetization direction).

2010

(February 2) The 2nd Memristor and Memristive Systems Symposium was held on Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at Sutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeley.

(February 17) A review on memristor and its modeling approaches was accepted by the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

(April 8) An array of memristors demonstrated the ability to perform logical operations.

(April 20) Memristor-based Content Addressable Memory (MCAM) was introduced and accepted in IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems.

(June 1) At the 2010 International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, there were two special sessions on memristor devices and fabrication. Mouttet's talk "The mythology of the memristor" argued that the interpretation of the memristor as a fourth fundamental was incorrect and that the device discovered by HPLabs was not actually a memristor, but part of a broader class of memristive systems.

(August 31) HP announced they had teamed up with Hynix to produce a commercial product dubbed "ReRam".

(October 15) At the 2010 IEEE Nanotechnology Materials and Devices Conference, Delgado presented "The Memristor as Controller". This work introduced the memristor as a programmable gain for closed loop systems and derived an approximate describing function for the pinched hysteresis loop.

(December 7) Ju-Hee So and Hyung-Jun Koo of North Carolina State University announced a hydrogel form of memristor which was speculated to be useful to construct a brain-computer interface.

2011

(Oct) Researchers at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) demonstrated printed memristive counters based on solution processing, with potential applications as low-cost packaging components (no battery needed; powered by energy scavenging mechanism).

2012

(March 23) A team of researchers from HRL Laboratories and the University of Michigan announced the first functioning memristor array built on a CMOS chip for applications in neuromorphic computer architectures.

(July 31) Severe criticism of the generalized memristor concept in the publication "Fundamental Issues and Problems in the Realization of Memristors".

2013

(February 27) Senior lecturer Dr. Andy Thomas and his colleagues from Bielefeld University construct a memristor that is capable of learning. The group utilize memristors as key components in a blueprint for an artificial brain. The results are presented in the March print edition of the Journal of Physics published by the Institute of Physics in London.