Emerging Computing Technologies

As transistor draws near to the end of it scaling limit, there is dire need for the semiconductor industry to explore new technologies to ensure continuous evolvement of computing devices as Gordon Moore predicted in 1965. Memristor: a novel electronic device is among the emerging technologies tipped to usher in a new generation of computer architectures because of its simple structure and smaller feature size than the transistor. The memristor a portmanteau of MEMory and ResISTOR (because it behaves like a linear resistor with memory) is a newly discovered two terminal circuit element (like the existing trio of resistor, capacitor and inductor), it is also known as the “Missing circuit element ”. Leon Chua first theoretically proposed the memristor in 1971 as the missing relationship between charge and flux when the fundamental circuit variables (charge, flux, voltage and current) are arranged in symmetry. Despite Chua’s efforts, memristor was not physically realized until 2008, when scientists at HP Labs fabricated a memristor that consist of a thin film of titanium oxide sandwiched between two platinum electrodes. HP lab’s exploit triggered an exponential rise of intense research on memristor. Since HP lab’s discovery of Chua’s memristor, several applications of this device have been proposed and demonstrated such as switch to replace Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor CMOS transistors in digital logic design, analog circuit design, synapse in neural networks implementation and storage cell in computing memory (primary and secondary). Among these applications, the memristor’s use as a storage cell in memory design is the most widely research area especially non-volatile memory (Resistive Memory) capable of eliminating the slow boot up process in our PCs.