Editorial Note on Memristor Models, Circuits and Architectures
Georgios Ch. Sirakoulis and Said Hamdioui
On January 2014, in Vienna, Austria, the 1st Workshop on Memristor Technology, Design, Automation and Computing, namely MemTDAC, affiliated with the HiPEAC’14 conference took place. In the quickly advancing field of memristor, the aforementioned workshop tried to provide a European forum to discuss memristor technology and its potential applications. The memristor is an emerging technology, which is triggering intense interdisciplinary activity and has the potential of providing many benefits, such as energy efficiency, density, reconfigurability, nonvolatile memory, novel computational structures and approaches, massive parallelism, etc. These characteristics may force to deeply revise existing computing and storage paradigms. In this context, MemTDAC aimed at creating an European network of competence and experts in all aspects of memristor technology including new memristive device technologies, device modeling and characterization, novel circuit concepts using memristors, memristor-based implication logic, memristor-based storage, neuro-inspired computing, system architectures using memristors, etc.
On October 2014, in the context of Computing Systems Week (CSW) Athens, the Thematic Session on Memristive Computing Architectures: Emergent and Future Challenges took place in Athens, Greece. Having in mind that this specific domain is gaining a continuously increasing interest by the European scientific community working on the design and development of memristor-based circuits and architectures, as was already expressed in the 1st MemTDAC workshop held within HiPEAC 2014 Conference, a series of keynote presenters were invited from a set of representative Universities and Institutes leading different key initiatives. The aim of this thematic session was to pursue the active discussion between key experts about the future perspectives and challenges that are emerging in the very timely research field of memristive computing architectures and memory systems, especially towards high performance computing.
Both events, through their programs provided insights into the current state of memristor research with inspiring invited talks and technical presentations from well known experts in the field. The events promoted lively discussion and inspiration to learn more about memristor technology, models, design, automation and computing as well as the challenges and barriers researchers face in achieving all aspects of memristor technology. Consequently, the final feeling about these events was that they really succeeded in gathering several people in Europe working on memristors across different design and application domains, and in reaching an agreement on the current and future challenges for the development of this field. The events also served as networking events as thorough technical discussions prompted after the events concluded.
In the view of the foregoing, we are delighted to bring to your attention this Special Issue of five papers dealing with memristor models, circuits, architectures and applications that were invited to be part of a volume of about one hundred pages. The submitted papers were thoroughly reviewed and meticulously revised as a detailed major extension of their previously presented abstracts in the context of MemTDAC 2014 and the Thematic Session on Athens CSW 2014, all organized under the umbrella of HiPEAC network.