There’s been a lot of talk over the past couple days about the recent announcement of memristors, which are apparently a new type of basic circuit component. What intrigues me is that apparently there was some theory that predicted that memristors should exits, much like the periodic table predicted the existence of elements that were discovered later. Is there a reasonable introduction to this theory? I’m looking for something that doesn’t require much of a background in circuit theory, although math is fine.
You can start here with this recent thread.
Why did you call it a “missing link”. You didn’t explain that in your OP.
That’s what all the news stories are calling it.
I saw that thread as well as the EE Times article. But it’s really not going into detail as to why it was theorized that these things ought to exist, which is what I’m really interested in here.
I think of it as a natural expectation from a symmetric viewpoint. Capacitors and inductors both have a relationship to the rate of change of voltage, so resistors were “expected” to have some sort of parallel relationship. This relationship only became measurable at nano- scales.
I hope that these devices are really the revolutionary devices they are supposed to be, and this isn’t just some esoteric oddity.
I think Wiki should explain most of it
Ehh, now I see the wiki page was mentioned in the other thread. Sorry. Your questions, to me, seem to be answered there, but I am probably missing something in your original question.
Quoth Wikipedia:
Why was it hypothesised that such a device should exist? I can guess that there are mermaids and unicorns out there, but this sounds like it was believable. What’s the theory that made it plausible?
From what I was reading on Slashdot(I know, I know), there are four fundamental variables when you’re talking about a circuit: current, voltage, charge and magnetic flux. Some of these variables are related mathematically: current is the derivative of charge with respect to time(by definition) and voltage is the derivative of flux with respect to time(Faraday’s Law).
Now, using a resistor we can get a relationship between current and voltage. Using a capacitor, we can get a relationship between voltage and charge. Using an inductor, we can get a relationship between flux and current. Chua hypothesized that it would be possible to construct a passive device, which he dubbed the memristor, that could relate flux and charge.
From what I understand, it was basically working out the equations for circuitry to find that there should be something else, then pushing the equations further to describe the traits it would have. That’s obviously greatly oversimplified and maybe not accurate either, it’s just from what I have gathered.
An article in IEEE spectrum that gives the circuit model.