Putting Memory Into Circuit Elements: Memristors, Memcapacitors, and Meminductors

The concepts of putting memory into circuit elements is studied by various researchers in terms of memristors, memcapacitors, and meminductors. The concept of memristors is studied by Chua who found that a memristor relates the current to the voltage, and when turning off the power source, depends on the integral of its entire past current wave-form. The researchers have also generalized the concept of memory devices to capacitors and inductors, thus defining two new memdevices such as memcapacitor and meminductors. It is found that all these elements show pinched hysteritic loops in the two constitutive variables that define them such as current-voltage for memistor and charge-voltage for memcapacitors. These elements are found to store information in a continuous manner and also store analog information, such that they are useful for analog circuits a and analog computation.