Effect of Joule Heating on Resistive Switching Characteristic in AlOx Cells Made by Thermal Oxidation Formation

• Main Authors: Xinxin Zhang, Ling Xu, Hui Zhang, Jian Liu, Dingwen Tan, Liangliang Chen, Zhongyuan Ma, Wei Li
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SpringerOpen 2020-01-01
• Series: Nanoscale Research Letters
• Subjects: Joule heating; AlOx-based RRAM; conductive filament; oxygen vacancies
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1186/s11671-019-3229-y

Abstract The AlOx-based resistive switching memory device is fabricated by an oxidation diffusion process that involves depositing an Al film on an ITO substrate and annealing at 400 °C in a vacuum. An AlOx interface layer with a thickness of ~ 20 nm is formed as a resistance switching layer. Bipolar and unipolar resistive switching (RS) behaviours are obtained when the compliance current is limited (≥ 1 mA). In the unipolar RS behaviour, the devices fail to perform set/reset cycles at a low temperature (40 K), which suggests that Joule heating is essential for the unipolar RS behaviour. In the bipolar RS behaviour, the abrupt reset transforms into a gradual reset with decreasing temperature, which suggests that Joule heating affects the rupture of the conductive filament. In addition, the conductive mechanisms in the high-resistance state and low-resistance state are revealed by the temperature dependence of the I-V curves. For the low-resistance state, the conduction mechanism is due to the electron hopping mechanism, with a hopping activation energy of 9.93 meV. For the high-resistance state, transport mechanism is dominated by the space-charge-limited conduction (SCLC) mechanism.