Memristors as Artificial Biochemical Reactions in Cytomorphic Systems

Abstract

A memristor is a nano-scale two-terminal stochastic electronic device. This paper proposes functional analogies between biochemical reactions and memristive devices. It shows that memristors can mimic biochemical reactions and gene networks efficiently and capture both deterministic and stochastic dynamics at the nano-scale level. We present different abstraction models and voltage-controlled resistive switching circuits that inherently model the activity of genetic circuits with low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). These findings constitute a milestone for cell-inspired circuit design with noise-tolerance and energy-efficiency features, which can provide a fast and simple emulative framework for studying arbitrary large-scale biological networks in systems and synthetic biology.