A paper presentation on

DESIGN OF MEMRISTOR
By P.Srilekha(094K1A0457)

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING

SYAMALADEVI INSTITTUTE OF TECHNOLOGY FOR WOMEN NANDYAL

detectable until the memristor is in the nanometer range. When the thickness of the memristor is larger than this, it is indistinguishable from a standard resistor. The main advantage of the memristor in modern computing is that it retains its This paper presents a brief review about the recent advanced technology concepts in the field of the 4th element, called as the memristor, which has the properties of R, L & C. Traditionally, there have been three different basic components to circuits, namely capacitors, resistors, and inducers. However, a new basic element to a circuit has been developed. This element is known as the memristor. A memristor is essentially a resistor with memory. The resistance of a memristor is dependent upon the amount of voltage which has been applied to it and the length of time this voltage was applied. The concept of a memristor was first developed in 1971. However, it was not until recently that researchers at HP Labs were able to build the first working one. in This is due mostly to the size resistance of a memristor are not dependence of the memristor. The changes resistance even when no voltage is applied. This would allow a computer to retain its saved state while off and would require less power to run when it is on. Another advantage to memristors is their analog nature. Whereas the switches in computers have only two states, on and off, the resistance in a memristor does not have a set amount of values it can be. While the memristor can still be used for digital memory storage, there currently going on is research into the

Abstract:

development of analog computers using memristors. The readers can use this paper as the ready reckoner for doing their research in the field of memristors, the data being obtained from various sources from the internet & from the papers of various researchers.

INTRODUCTION Memristance is a property of an electronic component. If charge flows in one direction through a circuit, the resistance of that component of the circuit will increase, and if charge flows in the opposite direction in the circuit, the resistance will decrease. If the flow of charge is stopped by turning off the applied voltage, the component will remember the last resistance that it had, and when the flow of charge starts again the resistance of the circuit will be what it was when it was last active. It turns out that memristance is becoming stronger as the feature sizes in circuits are getting smaller. At some point as we scale into the realm of nano-electronics, it will be necessary to explicitly take account of memristance in our circuit models in order to simulate and design electronic circuits properly. WHAT IS A MEMRISTOR Memristor is a simple word derived from memory resistor, because that is exactly its function to remember its history. A memristor is a two-terminal device that is built to express only the properties of memristance. Think of a resistor as a pipe through which water flows. The water is electric charge. The resistors obstruction of

the flow of charge is comparable to the diameter of the pipe: the narrower the pipe, the greater is the resistance. For the history of circuit design, resistors had a fixed pipe diameter. But a memristor is a pipe that changes diameter with the amount and direction of water that flows through it. If water flows through this pipe in one direction, it expands (becoming less resistive). But send the water in the opposite direction and the pipe shrinks (becoming more resistive). Further, the memristor remembers its diameter when water last went through. IMPORTANCE OF A MEMRISTOR Its time to stop shrinking. MooresLaw, the semiconductor industrys obsession with the shrinking of transistors and their commensurate steady doubling on a chip about every two years, has been the source of a 50 year technical and economic revolution. Whether this scaling paradigm lasts for five more years or 15, it will eventually come to an end. The emphasis in electronics design will have to shift to devices that are not just increasingly infinitesimal device . but increasingly capable. Memristor is the perfect example of such a

that there was a missing two-terminal It turns out that memristance is becoming stronger as the feature sizes in circuits are getting smaller. At some point as we scale into the realm of nano electronics, it will be necessary to explicitly take account of memristance in our circuit models in order to simulate and design electronic circuits properly. Combined with transistors in a hybrid chip, memristors could radically improve the performance of digital circuits without shrinking transistors.Using transistors more efficiently could in turn give us another decade, at least, of Moores Law performance improvement, without requiring the costly and increasingly difficult doublings of transistor density on chips. In the end, memristors might even become the cornerstone of new analog circuits that compute using architecture much like that of the brain. ORIGIN OF MEMRISTOR Prof. Leon Chua had just moved to the Electrical Engineering Department of UC Berkeley when he published his seminal paper, Memristor - The missing circuit element. IEEE Trans. Circuit Theory CT18, pp. 507-519 (1971). In this paper, Prof. Chua proved a number of theorems to show circuit element from the family of fundamental passive devices :resistor, capacitor and inductor, for e.g., elements that do not add energy to a circuit . He discovered a missing link in the pair wise mathematical equations that relate the four circuit quantities - charge, current, voltage, and magnetic flux - to one another. These can be related in six ways. Two are connected through the basic physical laws of electricity and magnetism, and three are related by the known circuit elements: resistors connect voltage and current, inductors connect flux and current, and capacitors connect voltage and charge. But one equation is missing from this group: the relationship between charge moving through a circuit and the magnetic flux surrounded by that circuit . Chua demonstrated mathematically that his hypothetical device would provide a relationship between flux and charge similar to what a non-linear resistor provides between voltage and current. In practice, that would mean the devices resistance would vary according to the amount of charge that passed through it. And it would remember that resistance value even after the current was turned off. He proved that no combination of non-linear resistors,

capacitors and inductors could duplicate the properties of a memristor; therefore the memristor is truly fundamentals. MODELLING OF MEMRISTORS The memristor is formally defined as a two-terminal element in which the magnetic flux m between the terminals is a function of the amount of electric charge q that has passed through the device. Each memristor is characterized by its memristance function describing the charge-dependent rate of change of flux with charge .

Fig: overall components of layout of memristor The v-I relationships between the various elements is given by: Resistor: dv=R di Inductor: d=L di Capacitor: dq=C dv But ,in a memristor it is the combination of all the three network elements i.e.,R,L,C. Thus in a memristor, the modeling equation is given by d=M dq. Noting from Faraday's law of induction that magnetic flux is simply the time integral of voltage and charge is the time integral of current, we may write the more convenient form M(q(t)) = = [dm/dt] / [dq/dt] = V/I It can be inferred from this equation that memristance is simply chargedependent resistance . If M(q(t)) is a constant ,then we obtain Ohms law R(t)=v(t) i(t). If M(q(t)) is nontrival ,however the equation is not equivalent because q(t) and M(t) will vary with time. Solving for voltages as a function of time we obtain V(t)=i(t)M(q(t) )

This

equation

reveals

that

and metal oxides. But the idiosyncrasies were usually ascribed to some mystery electrochemical attributed to the reaction, high electrical that breakdown or other spurious phenomenon voltages researchers were applying to their devices. As it turns out a great many of these reports were unrecognized examples of memristance. After chua theorized the memristor out of the mathematical ether, no one knew how to build one. Now,37 years later ,electronics have finally gotten small enough to reveal the secretes of fourth element . On April 30, 2008 a team at HP labs announced the development of a switching memristor. Based on a thin film of titanium dioxide, it has a regime of operation with an approximately linear charge resistance.

memristance defines a linear relationship between current and voltage, as long as charge does not vary. Of course, non-zero current implies time varying charge. Alternating current, however, may reveal the linear dependence in circuit operation by inducing a measurable voltage without net charge movement - as long as the maximum change in q does not cause much change in M. Furthermore, the memristor is static if no current is applied. If i(t) = 0, we find v(t) = 0 and M(t) is constant. This is the essence of the memory effect. The power consumption characteristic recalls that of a resistor, i2R & is given by P(t) = i(t) v(t) = I2(t) . M(q(t)) As long as M(q(t)) varies little, such as under alternating currents, the memristor will appear as a resistor. If M(q(t)) increases rapidly, however, current and power consumption will quickly stop . MEMRISTOR IMPLEMENTATION Even before professor chua postulated the existence of memristor many researchers were reporting what they called anomalous currentvoltage behavior in the micrometer-scale devices they had built out of unconventional materials like polymers

Fig. 2 : cross-bar architecture of a memristors structure shown in a scanning tunneling process WHY THE PROCESS OF

FABRICATING

THE

MEMRISTOR

result of memristance and something more general that can be called memristive behavior. They then went on to create an elementary circuit model that was defined by exactly the same mathematical equations as those predicted by Chua for the memristor, with the exception that this model had an upper bound to the resistance (which means that at large bias or long times, it is a memristive device). It was then showed that this simple model could reproduce a wide variety of eccentric and complex I - V curves that have been observed and reported over the years by many researchers, including ourselves. Most of these did not look much like the figure 8 curves of Chua in his paper, but rather S and N curves that have erroneously been attributed to negative differential resistance, which is one reason why the connection to memristive behavior had not been made earlier. A highly simplified form appropriate for a general audience journal like Nature or for a basic undergraduate course, the equations for the drift of oxygen vacancies in TiO2 and their influence on the

TOOK SO LONG PROCESS It was all about scale. We now know that memristance is an intrinsic property of any electronic circuit. Its existence could have been deduced by Gustav Kirchhoff or by James Clerk Maxwell, if either had considered non-linear circuits in the 1800s. But the scales at which electronic devices have been built for most of the past two centuries have prevented experimental observation of the effect. It turns out that the influence of memristance obeys an inverse square law : memristance is a million times as important at the nanometer scale as it is at the micrometer scale, and its essentially unobservable at the millimeter scale and larger . As smaller and smaller devices were built, memristance became more noticeable and in some cases dominant . Thats what accounts for all those strange results researchers have described Memristance has been hidden in plain slight all along. CONTRIBUTI ON OF HP LABS FOR MEMRISTOR HP labs were the first to understand that the hysteresis that was being observed in the I - V curves of a wide variety of materials and structures was actually the

electronic conduction in the material were also identical with our equivalent circuit model, and thus Chuas memristor equations was also shown .

From this, formula was

for the first time down for

a the

this bilayer of the two different titanium dioxides. The TiO2 is electrically insulating (actually a semiconductor), but the TiO2-x is conductive, because its oxygen vacancies are donors of electrons, which makes the vacancies themselves positively charged, they can be pushed up and down at will in the titanium dioxide material charged . If a positive voltage is applied to the top electrode of the device, it will repel the (also positive) oxygen vacancies in the TiO2-x layer down into the pure TiO2 layer. That turns the TiO2 layer into TiO2-x and makes it conductive, thus turning the device on. A negative voltage has the opposite effect: the vacancies are attracted upward and back out of the TiO2 and thus the thickness of the TiO2 layer increases and the device turns off. This switching polarity is what we had been seeing for years but had been unable to explain. Two important equations were then writtenone equation detailing the relationship between current and voltage for this equivalent circuit, and another equation describing how the application of the voltage causes the vacancies to move thereby writing down, for the first time, an equation for memristance in terms of the because they are electrically

written

memristance of a device in terms of material and geometrical properties of the device (just as the resistance is the resistivity of the material times the length divided by the cross sectional area of the resistor). This memristance formula immediately showed that the size of the most important term in the memristance gets larger the smaller the device thus showing that it was not very important for micron-scale electronics but is becoming very important for nanoscale device. In the Fig. 3 shown, researchers removed transistors from the bottom layer of this silicon-based chip (shown in yellow and blue) and replaced them with fewer memristors in the top layer (shown in red). Memristors can do the work of transistors but require less power and space. According to HP, they could revolutionize integrated circuits, an memory technology. HOW THE MEMRISTORS WORK The exotic molecule monolayer in the middle of the sandwich had nothing to do with the actual switching. Instead, what it did was control the flow of oxygen from the platinum dioxide into the titanium to produce the fairly uniform layers of TiO2 and TiO2-x. The key to the switching was

physical properties of a material. This provided a unique insight. Memristance arises in a semiconductor when both electrons and charged dopants are forced to move simultaneously by applying a voltage to the system. The memristance did not actually involve magnetism in this case; the integral over the voltage reflected how far the dopants had moved and thus how much the resistance of the device had changed. Finally a model was made to engineer the switches, which were now positively identified as memristors. It was then declared that we had to take the molecule monolayers out of our devices. It was important to find the exact amounts of titanium and oxygen to get the two layers to do their respective jobs. A month later, it worked. Not only did they have working devices, but were also able to improve and change their characteristics at will . But here is the real triumph. The resistance of these devices stayed constant whether we turned off the voltage or just read their states (interrogating them with a voltage so small it left the resistance unchanged). The oxygen vacancies didnt roam around; they remained absolutely immobile until we again applied a positive or negative voltage. Thats memristance: the

devices remembered their current history. Chuas mythical memristor was coaxed out off the page. A PPLICATIONS Emulating the behavior of a single memristor, Chua showed, requires a circuit with at least 15 transistors and other passive elements. The implications are extraordinary: just imagine how many kinds of circuits could be supercharged by replacing a handful of transistors with one single memristor. A few applications of memristors are : NVRAM: It stands for non-volatile random access memory. In its initial state, a crossbar memory has only open switches, and no information is stored. But once you start closing switches, you can store vast amounts of information compactly and efficiently. Because memristors remember their state, they can store data indefinitely, using energy only when you toggle or read the state of a switch, unlike the capacitors in conventional DRAM, which will lose their stored charge if the power to the chip is turned off. The NVRAM made with the types of memristor materials that are currently being studied by many groups around the world could be a strong competitor to the flash memory

market in about five years. The great thing is that the various metal oxides that have been identified as having a memory function are highly compatible with present chip

require active devices like transistors to supply energy MIMICING THE BRAIN (neural network): There is a similarity of memristor out it: an intelligent physical infrastructure that could provide structural assessment monitoring for bridges. How much moneyand how many livescould be saved ANALOG PARALLEL COMPS: Low-cost, low - energy - consuming computers that are much better suited to parallel processing the massive streams of real-time data feeds that are required to analyze, model, and diagnose many of our planets toughest problems like global warming. Instead of (or in addition to) supercomputers in the cloud, memristive technologies could be deployed in distributed and embedded systems. These memristors can be turned into integrated circuits that remember information, consume far less power than existing devices, and may someday learn from past behavior. An analog computer is a computational device in which the problem variables are represented as continuous, varying physical quantities. An analog computer implements a model of the system being studied. The physical form of the analog may be functionally similar to that of

fabrication facilities, so they can be made in existing foundries without a lot of changes being required . FPGAS: A paper was published last year by Greg Snider and William Stanley showing that memristors could vastly improve one type of processing circuit, called a fieldprogrammable gate array, or FPGA. By replacing several specific transistors with a crossbar of memristors, we showed that the circuit could be shrunk by nearly a factor of 10 in area and improved in terms of its speed relative to power-consumption performance . Right now, a prototype of this circuit is being tested in the HP labs. And memristors are by no means hard to fabricate. The titanium dioxide structure can be made in any semiconductor FAB currently in existence. The primary limitation to manufacturing hybrid chips with memristors is that today only a small number of people on Earth have any idea of how to design circuits containing memristors. It must be emphasize here that memristors will never eliminate the need for transistors: passive devices and circuits

the system, but more often the analogy is based solely upon the mathematical equivalence of the interdependence of the computer variables and the variables in the physical system . CONCLUSIONS This paper presented a brief review of the recent advanced technologies that lead to the development of the element, viz., the memristor and its wide-spread applications. REFERENCES [1] Leon Chua, Memristor-the Missing Circuit Element, Proc. IEEE Transactions on Circuit Theory, 1971. [2] Leon Chua and his student Sung Mo Kang, Memristive Devices and Systems :

Generalizing the theory of memristors and memristive systems including a property of zero crossing in the Lissajous curve characterizing current vs. voltage behavior, Proceedings of the IEEE , edition Marquiss [3] Robert Johnson of a and Stanford 4,597,162 2-terminal of

Ovshinsky,

U.S.

Patent

Manufacturing

reconfigurable resistance switching array based on phase changing materials patent, 1986. http://www.en.wikipedia.org