Friday, August 13, 2010

Memristors: The undergrad engineers are screwed!

So a while ago there was the announcement that Memristors had finally made the jump from theory into reality. Two years on and we see that there is a great deal of confusion over the implications of the technology and how to teach the technology. In a recent article from IEEE Spectrum: How Do You Teach the Memristor? they conducted an impromptu survey of Universities and besides the occasional mention of memristors in some early course materials the memristor is not studied at all.

The basic reasons for this are two fold (well three fold if you include the fact that courses just aren't updated that often), the main reason is that despite floating around in theory for since the early 70s no-one really knows how to teach them effectively and the second reason is they are non-linear and a pain in the arse to model.

Non-linear circuit modeling is, to say the least, extremely challenging. I can recall in my classes that there was enough trouble getting the whole class to understand Linear Time Invariant Circuits, the primary school version of circuit analysis compared non-linear modelling.

One thing that I'll watch with interest is the development and adoption of memristors in everyday electronics and their teaching in undergrad class rooms and lecture halls around the world. I looking forward to seeing them applied to new and novel applications, but sorry for the poor sods that end up getting stuck attempting to model them in a first year tute.

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