A technical paper titled “Thin-film design of amorphous hafnium oxide nanocomposites enabling strong interfacial resistive switching uniformity” was published by researchers at University of Cambridge, Linköping University, Purdue University, University College London, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and University at Buffalo.
“A design concept of phase-separated amorphous nanocomposite thin films is presented that realizes interfacial resistive switching (RS) in hafnium oxide–based devices. The films are formed by incorporating an average of 7% Ba into hafnium oxide during pulsed laser deposition at temperatures ≤400°C. The added Ba prevents the films from crystallizing and leads to ∼20-nm-thin films consisting of an amorphous HfOx host matrix interspersed with ∼2-nm-wide, ∼5-to-10-nm-pitch Ba-rich amorphous nanocolumns penetrating approximately two-thirds through the films. This restricts the RS to an interfacial Schottky-like energy barrier whose magnitude is tuned by ionic migration under an applied electric field. Resulting devices achieve stable cycle-to-cycle, device-to-device, and sample-to-sample reproducibility with a measured switching endurance of ≥104 cycles for a memory window ≥10 at switching voltages of ±2 V. Each device can be set to multiple intermediate resistance states, which enables synaptic spike-timing-dependent plasticity. The presented concept unlocks additional design variables for RS devices.”
Find the technical paper here. Published: June 2023.
Hellenbrand, Markus, Babak Bakhit, Hongyi Dou, Ming Xiao, Megan O. Hill, Zhuotong Sun, Adnan Mehonic et al. “Thin-film design of amorphous hafnium oxide nanocomposites enabling strong interfacial resistive switching uniformity.” Science Advances 9, no. 25 (2023): eadg1946.
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