N093-222 TITLE: Memristor Implementation in Software Defined Radio Hardware Architecture

TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Information Systems, Materials/Processes, Sensors

ACQUISITION PROGRAM: JPEO JTRS, Ground Mobile Radio, ACAT I

OBJECTIVE: Investigate and validate areas of hardware component improvements within a generic Software Defined Radio Hardware Architecture surround the use of Memristor componets.

DESCRIPTION: In a 1971 paper, Leon Chua, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, predicted the existence of a fourth fundamental device, which he called a memristor. He proved that memristor behavior could not be duplicated by any circuit built using only the other three passive circuit elements (resistor, capacitor, and inductor), which is why the memristor is truly fundamental. In May 2008, Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, CA published in Nature magazine that they had finally managed to build the device. R. Stanley Williams and Greg Snider published a paper in 2008 showing that memristors could vastly improve a field-programmable gate array. Memristors are easy to fabricate, the limitation to manufacturing hybrid chips with memristors is that only a small number of people have any idea of how to design circuits containing memristors. The goal of this effort is to determine what hardware components within a generic SDR architecture would benefit from the implementation of memristors within the circuits design and quantify the benefit.

PHASE I: Identify hardware components within a generic SDR hardware architecture that could be improved using memristors. Quantify the improvements by orders of magnitude. Provide a paper documenting the present state of the art, the approach and results.

PHASE II: Build and test prototype of circuit chosen from the results of Phase I.

PHASE III: Incorporate circuit from PHASE II in future JTRS SDRs.

PRIVATE SECTOR COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL/DUAL-USE APPLICATIONS: Homeland Security initiatives are driving municipal, county, state, and federal agencies to obtain an interoperable communications capability. Software Defined Radio and digital communications approaches are emerging as the next-generation solution to robust interoperability. The technology developed from this topic is directly applicable to these non-DOD interoperable communications applications.

REFERENCES:
1. R. Stanley Williams, HOW WE FOUND THE MISSING MEMRISTOR, IEEE Spectrum, DEC 2008.

2. Dmitri B. Strukov, Gregory S. Snider, Duncan R. Stewart & R. Stanley Williams, THE MISSING MEMRISTOR FOUND, Nature 453, 80-83 (1 May 2008).

3. Chua, Leon O. "Memristor � The Missing Circuit Element". IEEE Transactions on Circuits Theory (IEEE) 18 (5): 507�519. (September 1971).

KEYWORDS: RF components, microelectronics, electronic materials; JTRS

** TOPIC AUTHOR (TPOC) **

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