Memristor-Enabled Reconfigurable Integrated Circuits

Abstract

The holy grail of analogue integrated circuit design is adjustable analogue delay elements. Of course, all analogue circuits are filters. Internal delays impose overall low-pass character to all circuits so that broadband amplifiers are lowpass filters, while high-pass amplifiers are in band-pass filters. Analog circuit design is all about tayloring the frequency response of analogue circuits. Modern analogue integrated circuits are application specific, and only perform specific functions. In contrast, modern digital circuits are, nearly universally, general-purpose, programmable or reconfigurable: a single platform is used to address a wide range of computing problems. The analogue counterparts of FPGAs are field programmable analogue arrays (FPAA). Despite their highly desirable functionality, FPAAs, electronically-programmable analogue circuits (EPAC) and reconfigurable analogue signal processors (RASP) have failed to engage the analogue circuit engineering community due to limited complexity and difficulty in tailoring their frequency response.