Investigation of deposition technique and thickness effect of HfO2 film in bilayer InWZnO-based conductive bridge random access memory

In recent research on memristor of brain-mimicking integrated circuit (IC) architecture, the electrical performance of electrochemical metallization memory can be significantly improved by applying a bilayer switching structure. In this work, a novel amorphous semiconductor InWZnO (IWZO) is used as the main switching layer, and a bilayer structure with HfO2 is fabricated by different deposition technique. By surface and chemical composition analysis, the effect of deposition process and thickness of HfO2 have been fully explored. The bilayer memory inserted with 3 nm HfO2 formed by atomic layer deposition process exhibits excellent electrical properties, such as high endurance cycle (more than 2 x 10(3)), better retention time (up to 2 x 10(4) s, 85 degrees C), relatively uniform resistance state distribution and low compliance current operation. Consequently, the low power electrochemical metallization memory with optimized HfO2 layer has great potential for next generation memory in pixel and three-dimensional brain-mimicking IC technology.

Automated summary

The electrical performance of electrochemical metallization memory can be significantly improved by applying a bilayer switching structure. A novel amorphous semiconductor InWZnO is used as the main switching layer, and a bilayer structure with HfO2 is fabricated. The optimized bilayer memory with a 3 nm HfO2 layer shows excellent electrical properties and has great potential for next-generation memory in pixel and three-dimensional brain-mimicking IC technology.