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Friday, 28 June 2013

Memristors


ROLE OF MEMRISTORS IN ADVANCED ELECTRONIC   CIRCUIT THEORY

Typically electronics has been defined in terms of three fundamental elements such as resistors, capacitors and inductors. These three elements are used to define the four fundamental circuit variables which are electric current, voltage, charge and magnetic flux. Resistors are used to relate current to voltage, capacitors to relate voltage to charge, and inductors to relate current to magnetic flux, but there was no
Element which could relate charge to magnetic flux.
                     To overcome this missing link, scientists came up with a new element called Memristor. These Memristor has the properties of both a memory element and a resistor (hence wisely named as Memristor). Memristor is being called as the fourth Fundamental component, hence increasing
        The importance of its innovation. Its innovators say “Memristor are so significant that it would be mandatory to re-write the existing electronics engineering textbooks. “In this paper the introduction of Memristor and its role in advanced electronic circuits required to involved in processors, memory units and so on is presented

1. Definition of a Memristor
It is a two terminal passive element flux produced by it is proportional to charge flowing in it. The symbol of Memristor is given below.


So Memristor is a passive element which shoes fundamental relation between charge and flux

2. Flux –Charge Curve of a Memristor
Its φ-q curve is monotonically increasing. The slope of the φ–q curve is called Memristance M (q). Memristor is passive if and only if Memristance is non-negative. (M (q) ≥ 0).


Memristance is a transfer property of Memristor so it is simply impedance offered by Memristor. The current is defined as the time derivative of the charge and the voltage is defined as the time derivative of the flux.



Memristance is a property of the Memristor. When charge flows in a direction through a circuit, the resistance of the Memristor increases. When it flows in the opposite direction, the resistance of the Memristor decreases. If the applied voltage is turned off, thus stopping the flow of charge, the Memristor remembers the last resistance that it had. When the flow of charge is started again, the resistance of the circuit will be what it was when it was last active. So the Memristor is essentially a two-terminal variable resistor.

3. MODEL OF THE MEMRISTOR FROM HP LABS
In 2008, thirty-seven years after Chua proposed the Memristor, Stanley Williams and his group at HP Labs realized the Memristor in device form. To realize a Memristor, they used a very thin film of titanium dioxide (TiO2). The thin film is sandwiched between two platinum (Pt) contacts and one side of TiO2 is doped with oxygen vacancies. The oxygen vacancies are positively charged ions. Thus, there is a TiO2 junction where one side is doped and the other side is undoped. The device established by HP is shown in Fig.

D is the device length and w is the length of the doped region. Pure TiO2 is a semiconductor and has high resistivity. The doped oxygen vacancies make the TiO2-x material conductive. When a positive voltage is applied, the positively charged oxygen vacancies in the TiO2-x layer are repelled,
Moving them towards the undoped TiO2 layer. As a result, the boundary between the two materials moves, causing an increase in the percentage of the conducting TiO2-x layer. This increases the conductivity of the whole device. When a negative voltage is applied, the positively charged oxygen vacancies are attracted, pulling them out of TiO2 layer. This increases the amount of insulating TiO2, thus increasing the resistivity of the whole device. When the voltage is turned off, the oxygen vacancies do not move. The boundary between the two titanium dioxide layers is frozen. This is how the Memristor remembers the voltage last applied.
The simple mathematical model of the HP Memristor is given by

Roff    = High resistance state
Ron     = Low resistance state
W      =  width of doped region
D       = Thickness of semiconductor film sandwiched between two metal contacts.

4. Current–Voltage Curve of a Memristor
Memristor has the pinched hysteresis loop current voltage characteristic.
Another signature of the Memristor is that the pinched hysteresis loop shrinks with the increase in the excitation frequency. Figure shows the pinched hysteresis loop and an example of the loop shrinking with the increase in frequency. In fact, when the excitation frequency increases towards infinity, the Memristor behaves as a normal resistor.




5.DC and AC responses
DC response:
This example shows a Memristor, a recently discovered device. It acts as a resistor, but the resistance varies depending on the current over time. In this example, use the slider at right to select the input voltage. The Memristor has a high resistance at first, but current flow causes the resistance to decrease over time until it hits a minimum value. If you set the input voltage to a negative value, then the resistance will gradually increase until it hits a maximum value. A graph of the memristors voltage, current, and resistance is shown below the circuit.

Sine response
The graphs below the circuit show the memristors voltage (in green), current (in yellow), and resistance (in white). A graph of voltage versus current is also shown. Note that the voltage has a nonlinear relationship to current.


Square  response
The graphs below the circuit show the memristors voltage (in green), current (in yellow), and resistance (in white). A graph of voltage versus current is also shown.

Triangular response
 The graphs below the circuit show the memristors voltage (in green), current (in yellow), and resistance (in white). A graph of voltage versus current is also shown.

6. APPLICATIONS OF MEMERISTOR
Some of applications of Memristor are given below
  A.arithmethic operations
  B.logic operations
  C.memory unit

Basic arithmetic operations
For performing any arithmetic operation such as addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, at first, two operands should be represented by some ways. In almost all of currently working circuits, signal values are represented by voltage or current. However, as explained in previous section, analog values can be represented by the Memristance of the Memristor. When 2 Memristor connected in series there corresponding Memristor are added. By this concept addition operation is done


Any subtraction, such as M1M2 , can be written as M1+ ( M2). This means that for doing subtraction, Memristor should be connected in series with another Memristor which its Memristance is –M2 .

A simple opamp-based inverting amplifier which intrinsically is a Memristance divider. The output voltage of this circuit is M2/M1

In bellow circuit output is (M1+M2)(M1||M2) =M1.M2 so it performs multiplication operation


Logic operations
Consider the set of memristors as shown in Fig.24 shows nand gate. The Memristor Mem1 of inverting configuration is replaced by set of memristors Mem1-Mem3, which are connected in parallel. The control terminals of Mem1-Mem3 are connected. The Memristor Mem4 is unconditionally open by applying a high negative voltage – at the control terminal. Then a voltage is applied at the common control terminal and is applied to the control of Mem4. In the scenario where memristors Mem1-Mem3 are open, the voltage at the terminal X is close to 0. The voltage drop across Mem4 is , which is enough to close Mem4. In the scenario where one Memristor Mem1 is closed and Mem2 and Mem3 are open, the intermediate node settles close to and the voltage across Mem4 is not enough to close the Memristor. Similar results occur when Mem2 or Mem3 are open. Hence, the logical computation can be treated as Mem4 = (Mem1.Mem2.Mem3)` which is NAND operation. This configuration is referred to as ‗wired-AND‘ as various inputs are wired together to produce result.

Memristor Memory


Next, the sense amplifier stage as shown in Fig. 6 fully
converts the sensed memristor state to a full-swing digital output. The voltage Vx will be compared with the referencevoltage Vref  which is half of Vin. If the memristor stores logic zero, Vx is less than Vref and output Vo is VL. If memristor stores logic one, Vx is greater than Vref and output Vo would be VH.


Fig.  illustrates a memristor-based memory array with peripheral circuits. Just like a typical memory array such as that of DRAM, it still has row decoder, sense amplifier and column selector/decoder. In addition, there is a pulse generator unit and a selector unit. Pulse generator generates read/writes pattern signals shown in Fig. 4(b) and Fig. 5(c). In Fig. 7, when Pselect signal is high, NMOSs are short and
PMOSs are open, signal directly goes through. If Pselect signal is low, NMOSs are open and PMOSs are short so signal gets negative in sign. Furthermore, the purpose of the selector unit is to switch the memristor to ground for a write operation and Rx for a read operation. Read Enable (RE) signal controls the MUX to switch properly depending on whether it is a read or a write operation.
7. BENEFITS OF USING MEMRISTORS
The advantages of using Memristor are as given below:
Ø  It provides greater resiliency and reliability when power is interrupted in data centers.
Ø  Memory devices built using Memristor have greater data density.
Ø   Faster and less expensive than present day devices
Ø  Uses less energy and produces less heat.
Ø  Would allow for a quicker boot up since information is not lost when the device is turned off.
Ø  The information is not lost when the device is turned off.
Ø  A very important advantage of Memristor is that when used in a device, it can hold any value between 0 and 1. However present day digital devices can hold only 1 or 0. This makes devices implemented using Memristor capable of handling more data.

8. Future Research
Recently, researchers have defined two new memdevices- memcapacitor and meminductor, thus generalizing the concept of memory devices to capacitors and inductors. These devices also show ―pinched hysteresis loops in two constitutive variables— charge—voltage for the memcapacitor and current—flux for meminductor. Figure 13 shows the symbols for the memcapacitor and the meminductor.



Conclusion:-

 In a system contains mainly ALU and memory units. But they size can be reduced when they fabricate with memristors .so it leads a revolution in electronics

REFERENCE









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