Effect of Joule Heating on Resistive Switching Characteristic in AlOx Cells Made by Thermal Oxidation Formation
Xinxin Zhang, Ling Xu, Hui Zhang, Jian Liu, Dingwen Tan, Liangliang Chen, Zhongyuan Ma, Wei Li
Abstract
Abstract The AlO x -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 AlO x 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.