Novel hypostasis of old materials in oxide electronics: metal oxides for resistive random access memory applications

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of transition-metal oxide films with resistive switching properties for nonvolatile memory applications, presenting experimental results and theoretical models for their behavior in ReRAM devices.

Contribution

It provides new experimental data on threshold and resistive switching in various transition metal oxides and develops models to describe nonvolatile unipolar switching in NiO-based structures.

Findings

Transition metal oxides exhibit threshold and nonvolatile resistive switching.

Sandwich structures with these oxides can serve as ReRAM memory elements.

Theoretical models successfully describe unipolar switching behavior.

Abstract

Transition-metal oxide films, demonstrating the effects of both threshold and nonvolatile memory resistive switching, have been recently proposed as candidate materials for storage-class memory. In this work we describe some experimental results on threshold switching in a number of various transition metal (V, Ti, Fe, Nb, Mo, W, Hf, Zr, Mn, Y, and Ta) oxide films obtained by anodic oxidation. Then, the results concerning the effects of bistable resistive switching in MOM and MOS structures on the basis of such oxides as V2O5, Nb2O5, and NiO are presented. It is shown that sandwich structures on the basis of the Au/V2O5/SiO2/Si, Nb/Nb2O5/Au, and Pt/NiO/Pt can be used as memory elements for ReRAM applications. Finally, model approximations are developed in order to describe theoretically the effect of nonvolatile unipolar switching in Pt NiO-Pt structures.