Memristors: A perspective and impact on the electronics industry

Memristors are devices that promise a great impact on the electronic industry at the level of implementation, comparable to that caused by the invention of the transistor and the integrated circuit, both based on semiconductors. These devices may contribute to the improvement of the performance in both analog and digital circuits, especially in those demanding high consumption of resources due to signal processing. Although implementation approaches based on materials such as titanium dioxide (TiO2), led by HP Labs, are available for these devices, a wide commercial adoption of this technology has not arrived yet. A large set of contributions in the last ten (10) years, including patents and academic papers, are oriented to implementation models based on simulation and emulation at different fields of the electronics industry. Among these contributions, the simulation of biological systems has been extensively studied. This paper presents an overview of the impact of the memristor on the main application scenarios in the electronics industry, from the device implementation approaches to the architectural schemes of hardware systems for specific applications based on the models and features of these devices.