nanoREV.

Who discovered the Memristor?

Last week several news sources including the New York Times and CBS News, as well as various popular science journals including Scientific American and EETimes, reported on the May 1 publication in Nature by Hewlett Packard scientists describing the discovery of the “memristor“, a fourth fundamental circuit element after the resistor, capacitor, and inductor. While HP certainly deserves credit for this discovery, a closer inspection of prior technological and scientific publications reveals that this discovery is not entirely unprecedented. HP’s researchers certainly provide credit to Leon Chua for initially postulating the possibility of the memristor in 1971 but is HP really the first to produce such an element?

As described by the HP and Chua papers “memristance” basically boils down to a material with charge dependent resistance. As described in the recent Nature article the specific material used by HP to demonstrate this effect is a bilayer of TiO2 in which one of the layers has a slight depletion of oxygen atoms. However, researchers at IBM seem to have described a similar effect using thin film oxides in 2000. In addition, Samsung has a pending patent application for a variable resistance material seemingly identical to the memristor of HP both in structure and in effect and having foreign priority going back to February of 2006. While HP has done a good job in publicizing their work it may be premature to grant them the title of discoverer of this new electronic structure at this early stage. In any case, it will inevitably be newly discovered applications that will drive development of memristors and with various companies such as IBM, Samsung, HP, and various others all working on memristors it seems likely that such new applications are on the horizon. �