New Class of Discrete-Time Memristor Circuits: First Integrals, Coexisting Attractors and Bifurcations Without Parameters

The use of ideal memristors in a continuous-time (CT) nonlinear circuit is known to greatly enrich the dynamic behavior with respect to the memristorless counterpart, which is a crucial property for applications in future analog electronic circuits. This can be explained via the flux–charge analysis method (FCAM), according to which CT circuits with ideal memristors have for structural reasons first integrals (or invariants of motion, or conserved quantities) and their state space can be foliated in infinitely many invariant manifolds where they can display different dynamics. The paper introduces a new discretization scheme for the memristor which, differently from those adopted in the literature, guarantees that the first integrals of the CT memristor circuits are preserved exactly in the discretization, and that this is true for any step size. This new scheme makes it possible to extend FCAM to discrete-time (DT) memristor circuits and rigorously show the existence of invariant manifolds and infinitely many coexisting attractors (extreme multistability). Moreover, the paper addresses standard bifurcations varying the discretization step size and also bifurcations without parameters, i.e. bifurcations due to varying the initial conditions for fixed step size and circuit parameters. The method is illustrated by analyzing the dynamics and flip bifurcations with and without parameters in a DT memristor–capacitor circuit and the Poincaré–Andronov–Hopf bifurcation in a DT Murali–Lakshmanan–Chua circuit with a memristor. Simulations are also provided to illustrate bifurcations in a higher-order DT memristor Chua’s circuit. The results in the paper show that DT memristor circuits obtained with the proposed discretization scheme are able to display even richer dynamics and bifurcations than their CT counterparts, due to the coexistence of infinitely many attractors and the possibility to use the discretization step as a parameter without destroying the foliation in invariant manifolds.