A numerical analysis and experimental demonstration of a low degradation conductive bridge resistive memory device
Type
ArticleKAUST Department
Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) DivisionElectrical Engineering Program
Date
2017-10-23Online Publication Date
2017-10-23Print Publication Date
2017-10-28Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/10754/625958
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This study investigates a low degradation metal-ion conductive bridge RAM (CBRAM) structure. The structure is based on placing a diffusion blocking layer (DBL) between the device's top electrode (TE) and the resistive switching layer (RSL), unlike conventional CBRAMs, where the TE serves as a supply reservoir for metallic species diffusing into the RSL to form a conductive filament (CF) and is kept in direct contact with the RSL. The properties of a conventional CBRAM structure (Cu/HfO2/TiN), having a Cu TE, 10 nm HfO2 RSL, and a TiN bottom electrode, are compared with a 2 nm TaN DBL incorporating structure (Cu/TaN/HfO2/TiN) for 103 programming and erase simulation cycles. The low and high resistive state values for each cycle are calculated and the analysis reveals that adding the DBL yields lower degradation. In addition, the 2D distribution plots of oxygen vacancies, O ions, and Cu species within the RSL indicate that oxidation occurring in the DBL-RSL interface results in the formation of a sub-stoichiometric tantalum oxynitride with higher blocking capabilities that suppresses further Cu insertion beyond an initial CF formation phase, as well as CF lateral widening during cycling. The higher endurance of the structure with DBL may thus be attributed to the relatively low amount of Cu migrating into the RSL during the initial CF formation. Furthermore, this isomorphic CF displays similar cycling behavior to neural ionic channels. The results of numerical analysis show a good match to experimental measurements of similar device structures as wellCitation
Berco D, Chand U, Fariborzi H (2017) A numerical analysis and experimental demonstration of a low degradation conductive bridge resistive memory device. Journal of Applied Physics 122: 164502. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.5008727.Sponsors
The experimental data presented in this work were obtained by the support of the Nano-fabrication Core Lab at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).Publisher
AIP PublishingJournal
Journal of Applied PhysicsAdditional Links
http://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5008727ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1063/1.5008727