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Display Omitted An Al:HfO2 memristor emulates the strength change observed in biological synapses.The memristor is self-compliant, so there is no need of external current limitation.A train of identical pulses is applied to the memristor to change its conductance.Pulses with proper voltage-time width gradually change the memristor conductance. Resistive switching devices were at first conceived to be used in memory applications. Recently, they have also been studied as artificial synapses for neuromorphic applications. Therefore, lots of efforts are currently devoted to optimise both materials and programming techniques to design a device able to emulate the behaviour of biological synapses, i.e. able to gradually increase and decrease its conductance when proper electrical signals are applied.In this paper, an Al:HfO2 based memristor is presented as a suitable device as an artificial synapse in future neuromorphic circuits. A train of identical programming pulses was chosen because of its ease of implementation as an efficient and simple programming algorithm to emulate the strength change observed in biological synapses. With this algorithm we demonstrate that the conductance of the device can be both gradually increased and gradually decreased, provided an accurate choice of pulse amplitude and time width is made.