Memristors are continuously tunable resistors that emulate synapses. Conceptualized in the 1970s, they traditionally operate by voltage-induced displacements of matter, but the mechanism remains controversial. Purely electronic memristors have recently emerged based on well-established physical phenomena with albeit modest resistance changes. Here we demonstrate that voltage-controlled domain configurations in ferroelectric tunnel barriers yield memristive behaviour with resistance variations exceeding two orders of magnitude and a 10 ns operation speed. Using models of ferroelectric-domain nucleation and growth we explain the quasi-continuous resistance variations and derive a simple analytical expression for the memristive effect. Our results suggest new opportunities for ferroelectrics as the hardware basis of future neuromorphic computational architectures.
@article{arxiv.1206.3397,
title = {A ferroelectric memristor},
author = {André Chanthbouala and Vincent Garcia and Ryan O. Cherifi and Karim Bouzehouane and Stéphane Fusil and Xavier Moya and Stéphane Xavier and Hiroyuki Yamada and Cyrile Deranlot and Neil D. Mathur and Manuel Bibes and Agnès Barthélémy and Julie Grollier},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1206.3397},
year = {2015}
}