[pohl]

I was surprised today that the entry on Wikipedia still qualifies the memristor as "hypothetical", and says that "there are...some serious doubts as to whether the memristor can actually exist in physical reality".

I thought maybe research was farther along than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

[cbennett]

In truth it is. To practitioners in the field building circuits or doing simulations with nanodevices, this is somewhat of a tiresome debate.

To give some background, Leon Chua made certain claims about a hypothetical fourth circuit element and these debates largely stem back to claims about circuit analysis and mathematics. Basically his models predict a perfect device which, to my knowledge , has not been experimentally realized (to the contrary of HP's claims).

However , the funny thing is it doesn't really matter. We don't need a perfect memristor to build interesting and useful nanoionic and nano-redox circuits performing non-linear computational tasks. As modelers though, we do need to be careful making ideal claims about eternal non-volatility and device life (of course). Many point out that to the contrary of being ideal, these devices are extremely variable and imperfect- which is true. Anything built using nanofab techniques at the academic level (excluding semi-con industrial processes) will be..

Btw, If you want more physics depth on this , I can recommend any paper or book by Waser. They are all good. http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-3527334173...

Edit: adding a link to the first book chapter of aforementioned book I found which is already rather good. https://application.wiley-vch.de/books/sample/3527334173_c01...

[hodwik]

I was confused by that as well. I was under the impression HP made working memristors years ago.