title: Evolution of conductive filament and its impact on reliability issues in oxide-electrolyte based resistive random access memory.
abstract: The electrochemical metallization cell, also referred to as conductive bridge random access memory, is considered to be a promising candidate or complementary component to the traditional charge based memory. As such, it is receiving additional focus to accelerate the commercialization process. To create a successful mass product, reliability issues must first be rigorously solved. In-depth understanding of the failure behavior of the ECM is essential for performance optimization. Here, we reveal the degradation of high resistance state behaves as the majority cases of the endurance failure of the HfO2 electrolyte based ECM cell. High resolution transmission electron microscopy was used to characterize the change in filament nature after repetitive switching cycles. The result showed that Cu accumulation inside the filament played a dominant role in switching failure, which was further supported by measuring the retention of cycle dependent high resistance state and low resistance state. The clarified physical picture of filament evolution provides a basic understanding of the mechanisms of endurance and retention failure, and the relationship between them. Based on these results, applicable approaches for performance optimization can be implicatively developed, ranging from material tailoring to structure engineering and algorithm design.
authors.affiliation: Lab of Nano-fabrication and Novel Devices Integration, Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China.
authors.forename: Hangbing
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Lv
authors.affiliation: Lab of Nano-fabrication and Novel Devices Integration, Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China.
authors.forename: Xiaoxin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Lab of Nano-fabrication and Novel Devices Integration, Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China.
authors.forename: Hongtao
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Lab of Nano-fabrication and Novel Devices Integration, Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China.
authors.forename: Ruoyu
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Lab of Nano-fabrication and Novel Devices Integration, Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China.
authors.forename: Qi
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Lab of Nano-fabrication and Novel Devices Integration, Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China.
authors.forename: Writam
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Banerjee
authors.affiliation: Lab of Nano-fabrication and Novel Devices Integration, Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China.
authors.forename: Haitao
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: Lab of Nano-fabrication and Novel Devices Integration, Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China.
authors.forename: Shibing
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Long
authors.affiliation: Lab of Nano-fabrication and Novel Devices Integration, Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China.
authors.forename: Ling
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Lab of Nano-fabrication and Novel Devices Integration, Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China.
authors.forename: Ming
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Liu