Frequency Response of Metal-Oxide Memristors

TL;DR

This paper investigates the frequency response of metal-oxide memristors, revealing their behavior as reconfigurable RC low-pass filters with tunable cutoff frequencies suitable for AC circuit applications.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of metal-oxide memristors' frequency-dependent behavior and demonstrates how their reconfigurability can be tailored for specific AC frequency ranges.

Findings

Memristors act as RC low-pass filters at high frequencies.

Their cutoff frequency can be reconfigured by changing device capacitance.

Reconfigurability window varies across different material systems.

Abstract

Memristors have been at the forefront of nanoelectronics research for the last decade, offering a valuable component to reconfigurable computing. Their attributes have been studied extensively along with applications that leverage their state-dependent programmability in a static fashion. However, practical applications of memristor-based AC circuits have been rather sparse, with only a few examples found in the literature where their use is emulated at higher frequencies. In this work, we study the behavior of metal-oxide memristors under an AC perturbation in a range of frequencies, from 10^3 to 10^7 Hz. Metal-oxide memristors are found to behave as RC low-pass filters and they present a variable cut-off frequency when their state is switched, thus providing a window of reconfigurability when used as filters. We further study this behaviour across distinct material systems and we show that the usable reconfigurability window of the devices can be tailored to encompass specific frequency ranges by amending the devices' capacitance. This study extends current knowledge on metal-oxide memristors by characterising their frequency dependent characteristics, providing useful insights for their use in reconfigurable AC circuits.