Current-Voltage Characteristics of a Memristor

period T of the AC voltage applied across the memristor

20

initial fraction

w

0

of low-resistivity region in the memristor

0.5

A memristor (short for memory resistor) is the newly discovered (fourth) fundamental circuit element, the first three being the resistor, capacitor, and inductor. It was realized in 2008, some 37 years after its existence was postulated in 1971. This Demonstration shows the I-V curves for a memristor, modelled as two regions of different resistivities in series, and their dependence on the period

T

of the applied AC voltage and the initial fraction

w

0

of the low-resistivity region. The unusual I-V curves, plotted for time

t∈[0,T]

, show hysteresis that increases with

T

and leads large region of negative differential conductance

dI/dV<0

.