Memristor, the missing basic circuit element, was first proposed in 1971 in a seminal paper published by Professor Leon O. Chua. The concept gained a broader scope in a paper co-published by Leon Chua and Sung Mo Kang in 1976. In 2008, Stan Williams, et al. at HP Labs unveiled a two-terminal titanium dioxide nanoscale device that exhibited memristor and memristive characteristics, thus igniting renewed interest in memristors.

The first symposium on Memristor and Memristive Systems, held at UC Berkeley on November 21-22, 2008, inspired novel circuit applications and new efforts to develop memristors using various types of materials and nanoparticles, and also novel circuit applications and CAD models.