Journal
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTRON DEVICES
Volume 61, Issue 5, Pages 1394-1402Publisher
IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/TED.2014.2312943
Keywords
Dielectric breakdown; electrochemical processes; hafnium compounds; metal-insulator structures; nanotechnology; semiconductor memories
Funding
- Nanosciences Foundation of Grenoble, France
- Brazilian Agency CNPq through the INCT/Namitec initiative
- National Science Foundation of USA
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Through ab initio calculations, we propose that the conductive filaments in Pt/HfO2/Pt resistive random access memories are due to HfOx suboxides, possibly tetragonal, where x <= 1.5. The electroforming process is initiated by a continuous supply of oxygen Frenkel defect pairs through an electrochemical process. The accumulation of oxygen vacancies leads to metallic suboxide phases, which remain conductive even as ultranarrow 1-nm(2) filaments embedded in an insulating HfO2 matrix. Our experiments further show that the filaments remain as major leakage paths even in the OFF-state. Moreover, thermal heating may increase the OFF-state resistance, implying that there are oxygen interstitials left in the oxide layer, which may recombine with the oxygen vacancies in the filaments at high temperature.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available