Leon chua’s memristor

This essay was published in the IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine, Second Quarter, 2008, page 55. My simple Google search for the keyword “memristor” today surprisingly resulted in nearly 80,000 items, many referring back to Leon Chua’s seminal paper “Memristor — The Missing Circuit Element” published in the IEEE Transactions on Circuits Theory (vol. 18, no. 5, pp. 507-519, September 1971). In that paper Leon argued that in addition to the three well-known basic circuit elements, namely resistor, capacitor, and inductor, a fourThelement should exist. He named this element the memristor, meaning the “memory resistor” because it can remember the current passing through it even after the current has disappeared. Is that a reality? On April 30, 2008, the Hewlett-Packard research team proudly announced their realization of a memristor prototype, with an official publication entitled “The Missing Memristor Found” in Nature (vol. 453, pp. 80-83, May 1, 2008).