I received notice yesterday (Sept. 5, 2012) of a paper,  ‘Fundamental Issues and Problems in the Realization of Memristors’, disputing HP Labs’ 2008 discovery of the ‘memristor’.

Written by Paul Meuffels and Rohit Soni, the paper examines the ‘memristor’ claims from the perspective of  electrochemistry. From the July 31, 2012 submission on arXiv.org,

In 2008, researchers at the Hewlett-Packard (HP) laboratories claimed to have found an analytical physical model for a genuine memristor device [1]. The model is considered for a thin TiO_2 film containing a region which is highly self-doped with oxygen vacancies and a region which is less doped, i.e., a single-phase material with a built-in chemical inhomogeneity sandwiched between two platinum electrodes. On base of the proposed model, Strukov et al. [1] were able to obtain the characteristic dynamical state equation and current-voltage relation for a genuine memristor. However, some fundamental facts of electrochemistry have been overlooked by the authors while putting forward their model, namely the coupling of diffusion currents at the boundary between both regions. The device will operate for a certain time like a “chemical capacitor” until the chemical inhomogeneity is balanced out, thus violating the essential requirement on a genuine memristor, the so-called “no energy discharge property”. Moreover, the dynamical state equation for the HP-memristor device must fail as this relation violates by itself Landauer’s principle of the minimum energy costs for information processing. Maybe, such an approach might be upheld if one introduces an additional prerequisite by specifying the minimum amount of electric power input to the device which is required to continuously change internal, physical states of the considered system. However, we have reasonable doubts with regard to this.

Speaking as an amateur, while I cannot follow the discussion in any depth, this paper is written in such a fashion that the argumentation can be followed even by someone (such as me) with little knowledge of chemistry or electronics. I can’t assess the validity of the validity of the arguments and would dearly to see a response from HP Labs with their take on this approach.

In the meantime I’m left with a question, if HP Labs did not ‘discover the memristor, what did they find?