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Scientists Discovered a New Circuit Element: a 'Meminductor'

Q: What is a meminductor?

Krishna:

Scientists Discovered a New Circuit Element: a 'Meminductor' (2)

Scientists have discovered a new component of circuitry.
For centuries, we thought circuits only had three basic parts: inductors, capacitors, and resistors. But over the last 20 years, scientists have discovered “memory” versions of capacitors and resistors—memcapacitors and memrisitors.
Recently, a team of experts discovered yet another circuitry element—the meminductor. These “mem” versions can remember their properties even after powering down.

In his seminal 1971 paper, Leon Chua observed that while the resistor, the capacitor and the inductor were respectively defined by current–voltage, charge–voltage, and current-flux relationships, a circuit element defined by charge-flux relationship was missing. This led him to conceive of the fourth fundamental circuit element, the memristor which was characterized by a constitutive relationship between charge and flux. In 1977, Chua defined the larger class of memristive systems and updated the defining feature of a memristor to be a “pinched hysteresis” curve in the current–voltage plane. He later went on to develop the genealogy of memristors, with the original idea of charge-flux relationship only defined to be a requirement for ideal memristors and not for generic and extended memristors (1).

Circuits are borderline omnipresent. They're also nothing new. Electrical circuitry allows us to power everything from our cars, to our computers, to the lights in our homes. And the first simple circuit was created in 1800.

In the over 200 years since the first circuit was created, circuits didn’t change much on a fundamental level. Each one was a combination of three elements: inductors (which store energy in a magnetic field), capacitors (which stores energy in an electric field), and resistors (which restrict the flow of electricity).

But in 2008, that changed pretty dramatically with the invention of the memristor, a resistor that can remember—hence the “mem” prefix—their assigned properties even after the circuit has been switched off and back on. The discovery of the memcapacitor followed 11 years later.

And recently, another research team has announced the discovery of another new circuit element—the meminductor. Those two discoveries set the world a little bit on its head as far as electrical engineering.

To find this sought-after element, the team set up a circuit comprised mainly of an electromagnet and two permanent magnets to take a look at the density and strength of a magnetic field flowing through an inductor. Using this technique, the researchers were able to uncover a particular “mem” signature inside the inductor which, according to a news release, led to the inductor’s “mem- state, or memory-like nature, by the same definition that the memristor and memcapacitor were realized.”

This discovery rounds out the expected series of the “mem” versions of standard circuit elements. But right now, the element isn't a pure meminductor in and of itself—it's a regular inductor that is expressing meminductor behaviour (2).

So a meminductor is a device that can store and process information. It is a new type of electronic component that combines the properties of a memristor and an inductor.