The Fabrication and MOSFET-Only Circuit Implementation of Semiconductor Memristor

In this paper, a ZnO-based semiconductor thin film memristor (300 nm in thickness) device is fabricated using metallic top and bottom electrodes by direct-current reactive magnetron sputter. The memristive characteristics of the device were completed by time-dependent current-voltage (I-V-t) measurements, and the typical pinched hysteresis I-V loops of the memristor were observed. This paper is continued with the designing memristor emulator circuit, which has only four MOS transistors. The proposed circuit is suitable both for emulating the fabricated memristor and for using general memristor-based applications. Any circuit blocks such as a multiplier or active element are not used in the circuit to obtain memristive characteristics. All results of the proposed memristor emulator circuit are compatible with general characteristics of the fabricated semiconductor device. The MOSFET-based proposed memristor emulator circuit is laid out in the Analog Design Environment of Cadence Software using 180-nm TSMC CMOS process parameters and its layout area is 366 μm2. So as to show its performance, the dependences of the operating frequency and process corner as well as effects of radical temperature changes have been investigated in the simulation results section. © 2012 IEEE.