Investigation of STDP mechanisms for memristor circuits

Abstract

Memristive systems have become popular as a research field after the experimental realization of a memristor by the HP Labs research team. Researchers have demonstrated the synaptic behavior of the memristor in addition to its nonlinear and nonvolatile characteristics. Synapses play an important role in the learning process and spiketiming-dependent plasticity (STDP) is a fundamental synaptic learning rule. Because of problems with finding the memristor on the market as a discrete circuit element, researchers have designed many types of memristor circuits to emulate memristors. However, no information is available about the STDP behavior of these designed memristor emulators. This paper investigated the STDP property of some basic memristor circuits and the mathematical and simulation results demonstrated that none of them could support the STDP learning rule.