Application of the Memristor in Reconfigurable Electromagnetic Devices

The recently popularized memristor, short for memory resistor, is investigated in this paper for its potential as a new and attractive method for enabling reconfigurable radio-frequency (RF) devices. The charge- or flux-controlled resistance of this "fourth circuit element" allows for easy reconfigurability and maintains its configured state in the absence of controlling signals. A specialized finite-difference time-domain simulation code is developed and employed to design devices with embedded memristors. The time-domain code allows observation of the nonlinear memristor switching characteristics and real-time functionality of the reconfigurable device. Several different reconfigurable RF devices are designed here to demonstrate the versatility of the memristor and determine the behavior of systems which utilize them.