Implementation and Characterization of a Memristive Memory System

Abstract

Memristors are one of the promising emerging technologies to address several challenges faced by the computing system of the day. However, a sizeable portion of the works in the literature are not supported by practical implementations or their details are kept as trade secrets. In this work, we propose and implement a writing and reading circuit for a memristive memory system and present our measurement results. A key feature of the proposed system is that it does not need any read-out compensation and virtually no refreshing (due to readout). However, we observed that by the passage of the time (and irrespective of not applying any inputs) some information loss happens, which necessitates refreshing and dictates its frequency. We associate this phenomenon, which has not been reported in the literature before, to what we call “leakage current”. We anticipate this paper to be a starting point for seeing more implementation-based works in the literature, modeling the leakage current phenomenon, and incorporating such design and consideration into the design process of memristive systems.