Metal oxide resistive memory switching mechanism based on conductive filament properties
By Gennadi Bersuker, David C. Gilmer, D. Veksler, P. Kirsch, Luca Vandelli, Andrea Padovani, Luca Larcher, K. McKenna, Alexander L. Shluger, V. Iglesias and 2 more. 2011
461 citations recorded by the source corpus.
By combining electrical, physical, and transport/atomistic modeling results, this study identifies critical conductive filament (CF) features controlling TiN/HfO2/TiN resistive memory (RRAM) operations. The leakage current through the dielectric is found to be supported by the oxygen vacancies, which tend to segregate at hafnia grain boundaries. We simulate the evolution of a current path during the forming operation employing the multiphonon trap-assisted tunneling (TAT) electron transport model. The forming process is analyzed within the concept of dielectric breakdown, which exhibits much shorter characteristic times than the electroforming process conventionally employed to describe the formation of the conductive filament. The resulting conductive filament is calculated to produce a non-uniform temperature profile along its length during the reset operation, promoting preferential oxidation of the filament tip. A thin dielectric barrier resulting from the CF tip oxidation is found to control filament resistance in the high resistive state. Field-driven dielectric breakdown of this barrier during the set operation restores the filament to its initial low resistive state. These findings point to the critical importance of controlling the filament cross section during forming to achieve low power RRAM cell switching.
Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd90281db27387269c6c07aaf9e726daaa6b3d63
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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering
- Daniele Ielmini
- Federico Nardi
- David C. Gilmer
- Simone Balatti
- S. Larentis
- An Chen
- Rainer Waser
- R. Bruchhaus
In Materials Chemistry
Citations in the corpus
- A review of emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies and applications (2016, background): “Forming plays a critical role in defining RRAM switching characteristics [35]; however, this one-time process may complicate RRAM design and operation.”
- Electronic properties of hafnium oxide: A contribution from defects and traps (2016, unknown): “Presently, it is widely recognized that the most thermodynamically favourable defects in hafnium oxide are oxygen vacancies (VO) [1,4,5,36].”
- Resistive Switching by Voltage-Driven Ion Migration in Bipolar RRAM—Part I: Experimental Study (2012, methodology): “Electrical measurements in this paper were carried out on metal–insulator–metal (MIM) devices consisting of a HfOx layer of 20-nm thickness (except where noted) with TiN top and bottom electrodes [7], [9], [20], [22].”