Three fingerprints of memristor

Abstract

This chapter illustrates that for a device to be amemristor it should exhibit three characteristic fingerprints: (1) When driven by a bipolar periodic signal the device must exhibit a “pinched hysteresis loop” in the voltage-current plane, assuming the response is periodic and not symmetrical. (2) Starting from some critical frequency, the hysteresis lobe area should decrease monotonically as the excitation frequency increases, and (3) the pinched hysteresis loop should shrink to a single-valued function when the frequency tends to infinity. Examples of memristors exhibiting these three fingerprints, along with non-memristors exhibiting only a subset of these fingerprints are also presented. In addition, two different types of pinched hysteresis loops; the transversal (self-crossing) and the non-transversal (tangential) loops exhibited by memristors are also discussed with its identification criterion.