Practical Memristor Emulator Circuit Development Techniques for Analog Applications

Abstract

Emerging memristor technology is drawing widespread attention during recent time due to its potential diverse applications in nanoelectronic memories, logic and neu romorphic computer architectures, digital and analog modulations system, and oscillator circuits. There has been a surge of interest to study memristor. However, as of now there is no single device available in the market that can truly exhibit the memristive be havior for a certain frequency range. Due to the absence of a real fabricated memristor, researchers are still relying on the memristor emulators to investigate the behavior and applications of memristor. Memristor emulator circuits are intended to understand and mimic the perceived behavior and properties of memristor. In addition, memristor has recently been recognized as a new and the fourth passive element that has the potential for many applications in digital, analog, and mixed signal domains. In the absence of a physical memristor, these emulator circuits would be of great importance to understand the fundamental concepts and potential applications related to memristor,becausetheseemulatorcircuitscanbebuiltinthelaboratoryusinginexpensive off-the-shelf circuit components. One of the most widely used ideal memristor models developedbytheHPLabdoesnotfittheanticipatednonlinearbehaviorofarealmemris tor. Therefore, this dissertation has proposed generic and practical emulator circuits for a current-controlled and voltage-controlled memristor, which can be used to mimic the behavior of the well-known memristor models like-Simmons Tunneling Barrier Model (STBM), ThrEshold Adaptive Memristor (TEAM) Model, and Voltage ThrEshold Adap tive Memristor (VTEAM) in addition to the simple Hewlett Packard (HP) model. Prior emulators can only emulate the linear electrical behavior. Moreover, the proposed emulator circuit development techniques can be config ured for both floating and grounded models. In addition to the mathematical modeling and analysis of the proposed emulator, we provide SPICE simulation and experimental results. The analytical observations and the experimental results show that the proposed circuits can mimic the nonlinear behavior of real memristors for certain frequency range. Furthermore, the proposed emulator has been used to verify some applications like Wien bridge oscillator. Both series and parallel connectivity of the proposed emulator circuits have been studied experimentally. Finally, a brief comparison with the previously pub lished emulators is presented to highlight the advantages of the proposed design.