Effect of SET temperature on data retention performances of HfO2-based RRAM cells

In this paper the effect of SET temperature on data-retention performances in HfO2-based RRAM has been thoroughly investigated. We demonstrated, for the first time to our knowledge, that high temperature programming (even if it has no influence on the initial resistance) has a strong effect on thermal stability of the conductive filaments. Moreover, we highlighted the impact of SET temperature also on RESET characteristics. We gathered all these experimental evidences under a simple modeling of the filament morphology, proving that the filament size might be tuned by adjusting the programming temperature. We conclude that reducing the conductive filament diameter while keeping high density of the oxygen vacancies significantly improves data retention.