Eastern Macedonia and Thrace Institute of Technology
Abstract
The existence of the memristor, as a fourth fundamental circuit element, by researchers at Hewlett Packard (HP) labs in
2008, has attracted much interest since then. This occurs because the memristor opens up new functionalities in
electronics and it has led to the interpretation of phenomena not only in electronic devices but also in biological systems.
Furthermore, many research teams work on projects, which use memristors in neuromorphic devices to simulate
learning, adaptive and spontaneous behavior while other teams on systems, which attempt to simulate the behavior of
biological synapses.
In this paper, the latest achievements and applications of this newly development circuit element are presented. Also, the
basic features of neuromorphic circuits, in which the memristor can be used as an electrical synapse, are studied. In this
direction, a flux-controlled memristor model is adopted for using as a coupling element between coupled electronic
circuits, which simulate the behavior of neuron-cells. For this reason, the circuits which are chosen realize the systems of
differential equations that simulate the well-known Hindmarsh-Rose and FitzHugh-Nagumo neuron models. Finally, the
simulation results of the use of a memristor as an electric synapse present the effectiveness of the proposed method and
many interesting dynamic phenomena concerning the behavior of coupled neuron-cells
