Intrinsic Resistive Switching in Bulk SiO x Films
- PDF / 237,345 Bytes
- 6 Pages / 432 x 648 pts Page_size
- 69 Downloads / 228 Views
Intrinsic Resistive Switching in Bulk SiOx Films Adnan Mehonic1, Sébastien Cueff2, Maciej Wojdak1, Stephen Hudziak1, Olivier Jambois3, Christophe Labbé2, Blas Garrido3, Richard Rizk2 and Anthony J. Kenyon1 1
Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering, UCL, Torrington Place, London WC1E 7JE, UK 2
CIMAP, UMR CNRS 6252 ENSICAEN, 6 Boulevard Maréchal Juin, 14050 Caen Cedex 4, France 3
MIND-IN2UB, Dept. Electrònica, Universitat de Barcelona, Martí i Franquès 1, 08028, Barcelona, CAT, Spain ABSTRACT We report a study of resistive switching in a silicon-based memristor/resistive RAM (RRAM) device in which the active layer is silicon-rich silica. The resistive switching phenomenon is an intrinsic property of the silicon-rich oxide layer and does not depend on the diffusion of metallic ions to form conductive paths. Both unipolar and bipolar programming is demonstrated. Switching exhibits the pinched hysteresis I/V loop characteristic of RRAM/memristive systems, and on/off resistance ratios of 104:1 or higher can be easily achieved. Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy suggests that switchable conductive pathways are 10nm in diameter or smaller. INTRODUCTION The Resistive Random Access Memories (RRAM) have attracted a lot of attention as the next generation of non-volatile memories due to promising results regarding scalability, energy consummation, reliability and operational speed. The best results have been seen for metallic oxide materials [1-2]. Silicon is certainly the most used material in semiconductor industry and thus inherently the most wanted. Amorphous silicon or silicon oxide is mainly used as the host material to support diffusion of the metallic filaments from the metallic contacts or to be doped with the metallic ions [3-5]. However, in CMOS processing the diffusion of metallic ions is undesirable, as this could potentially endanger the operation of surrounding electronics. The intrinsic resistive switching of silicon oxide is a more appealing mechanism. The first such system with very good properties was demonstrated by Yao et al [6], who reported a switchable silicon conductive path formed on the vertical surface a of silicon-rich silica pillar. However, the operation of such a device is possible only under vacuum due to oxidation of silicon conductive pathways on the device surface under ambient conditions. Silicon nanofilaments at vertical surfaces of mesa structures were proposed as the switching elements. Consequently exposition of vertical surface is crucial for the device operation [14]. In contrast, we demonstrate here a device operating under ambient conditions that relies on switching within a continuous thin film of silicon-rich silica. The device can be cycled between
147
high resistance “OFF” and low resistance “ON” states with a resistance contrast of 10,000 or more. EXPERIMENT
Figure 1. (a) Device design previously reported [6,14] with the exposited surface (b) Device design without exposited surface Our test devices (Figure 1(b)) contain thin (15-120nm) SiOx layers sandwiched between
Data Loading...
