Comment on "If it's pinched it's a memristor" by L. Chua [Semicond. Sci. Technol. 29, 104001 (2014)]

Abstract: In his paper "If it's pinched it's a memristor" [Semicond. Sci. Technol. 29, 104001 (2014)] L. Chua claims to extend the notion of memristor to all two-terminal resistive devices that show a hysteresis loop pinched at the origin. He also states that memcapacitors and meminductors can be defined by a trivial replacement of symbols in the memristor relations, and, therefore, there should be a correspondence between the hysteresis curves of different types of memory elements. This leads the author to the erroneous conclusion that charge-voltage curves of any memcapacitive devices should be pinched at the origin. The purpose of this Comment is to correct the wrong statements in Chua's paper, as well as to highlight some other inconsistencies in his reasoning. We also provide experimental evidence of a memcapacitive device showing non-pinched hysteresis.