Physical implementation of the memristor at industrial scale sparked the interest from various disciplines, ranging from physics, nanotechnology, electrical engineering, neuroscience, to intelligent robotics. As any promising new technology, it has raised hopes and questions; it is an extremely challenging task to live up to the high expectations and to devise revolutionary and feasible future applications for memristive devices. The possibility of gathering prominent scientists in the heart of the Silicon Valley given by the 2011 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks held in San Jose, CA, has offered us the unique opportunity of organizing a series of special events on the present status and future perspectives in neuromorphic memristor science. This book presents a selection of the remarkable contributions given by the leaders of the field and it may serve as inspiration and future reference to all researchers that want to explore the extraordinary possibilities given by this revolutionary concept.

This book reports on the latest advances in and applications of memristors, memristive devices and systems. It gathers 20 contributed chapters by subject experts, including pioneers in the field such as Leon Chua (UC Berkeley, USA) and R.S. Williams (HP Labs, USA), who are specialized in the various topics addressed in this book, and covers broad areas of memristors and memristive devices such as: memristor emulators, oscillators, chaotic and hyperchaotic memristive systems, control of memristive systems, memristor-based min-max circuits, canonic memristors, memristive-based neuromorphic applications, implementation of memristor-based chaotic oscillators, inverse memristors, linear memristor devices, delayed memristive systems, flux-controlled memristive emulators, etc. Throughout the book, special emphasis is given to papers offering practical solutions and design, modeling, and implementation insights to address current research problems in memristors, memristive devices and systems. As such, it offers a valuable reference book on memristors and memristive devices for graduate students and researchers with a basic knowledge of electrical and control systems engineering.

The investigation of new memory schemes, neural networks, computer systems and many other improved electronic devices is very important for future generation's electronic circuits and for their widespread application in all the areas of industry. In this aspect the analysis of new efficient and advanced electronic elements and circuits is an essential field of the highly developed electrical and electronic engineering. The resistance-switching phenomenon, observed in many amorphous oxides has been investigated since 1970 and it is a promising technology for constructing new electronic memories. It has been established that such oxide materials have the ability for changing their conductance in accordance to the applied voltage and memorizing their state for a long-time interval. Similar behaviour has been predicted for the memristor element by Leon Chua in 1971. The memristor is proposed in accordance to symmetry considerations and the relationships between the four basic electric quantities - electric current i, voltage v, charge q and magnetic flux Ψ. The memristor is an essential passive one-port element together with the resistor, inductor, and capacitor. The Williams HP research group has made a link between resistive switching devices, and the memristor proposed by Chua. A number of scientific papers related to memristors and memristor devices have been issued and several memristor models have been proposed. The memristor is a highly nonlinear component. It relates the electric charge q and the flux linkage, expressed as a time integral of the voltage. The memristor element has the important capability for remembering the electric charge passed through its cross-section and its respective resistance, when the electrical signals are switched off. Due to its nano-scale dimensions, non-volatility and memorizing properties, the memristor is a sound potential candidate for application in computer high-density memories, artificial neural networks and in many other electronic devices.

Nowadays, scientific research deals with alternative solutions for creating non-traditional computing systems, such as neural network architectures where the stochastic nature and live dynamics of memristive models play a key role. The features of memristors make it possible to direct processing and analysis of both biosystems and systems driven by artificial intelligence, as well as develop plausible physical models of spiking neural networks with self-organization. This book deals with advanced applications illustrating these concepts, and delivers an important contribution for the achievement of the next generation of intelligent hybrid biostructures. Different modeling and simulation tools can deliver an alternative to funding the theoretical approach as well as practical implementation of memristive systems.

Summary: "As memristors are not yet on the market, the development of memristor emulators and memristor based circuits is very important for real and practical engineering applications. The objectives of this book are to review the basic concepts of the memristor, describe state-of-the-art memristor based circuits and to stimulate further research and development in this area."--Preface.

This book covers a range of models, circuits and systems built with memristor devices and networks in applications to neural networks. It is divided into three parts: (1) Devices, (2) Models and (3) Applications. The resistive switching property is an important aspect of the memristors, and there are several designs of this discussed in this book, such as in metal oxide/organic semiconductor nonvolatile memories, nanoscale switching and degradation of resistive random access memory and graphene oxide-based memristor. The modelling of the memristors is required to ensure that the devices can be put to use and improve emerging application. In this book, various memristor models are discussed, from a mathematical framework to implementations in SPICE and verilog, that will be useful for the practitioners and researchers to get a grounding on the topic. The applications of the memristor models in various neuromorphic networks are discussed covering various neural network models, implementations in A/D converter and hierarchical temporal memories.