Two centuries of memristors

Memristors are dynamic electronic devices whose nanoscale realization has led to considerable research interest. However, their experimental history goes back two centuries.

Memristors are nonlinear dynamic electronic devices with widespread applications in computer data storage and neuromorphic implementations. The realization of a nanoscale memristor by Hewlett Packard in 20081 came almost 40 years after its theoretical inception2, and ever since it has precipitated an enormous interest on emerging applications that leverage on the dynamic nature of such devices. Nonetheless, as the research community became acquainted with memristive attributes, it became evident that these unconventional characteristics have been to a great extent observed and documented before. The functional properties of memristors were first documented by Chua2 and later on by Chua and Kang3, with their main fingerprint being a pinched-hysteresis loop when subjected to a bipolar periodic signal. This particular signature has been explicitly observed in a number of devices for more than one century, while it can be extrapolated for devices that appeared as early as the dawn of the nineteenth century.