Teaching Memristors to EE Undergraduate Students [Class Notes]

Generations of electrical engineers have learned that there are three fundamental passive two-terminal circuit elements: resistor, capacitor, and inductor. Nevertheless, this apparently immovable situation changed in 2008 when Nature published an article on the memristor, which was proved to be the fourth fundamental circuit element. Since then, researchers have devoted time and effort to find how this device may possibly change the future of electronics. It is time then to introduce the memristor in EE undergraduate courses, but how? The great majority of works on memristor published so far have been aimed at experienced researchers and not at young students. The goal of this paper is providing an original point of view on this issue and describing a simple approach to memristor which is suitable to be used in EE undergraduate courses.