All Nonmetal Resistive Random Access Memory

Te Jui Yen; Andrei Gismatulin; Vladimir Volodin; Vladimir Gritsenko; Albert Chin

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-42706-9

All Nonmetal Resistive Random Access Memory

Sci Rep. 2019 Apr 16;9(1):6144. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-42706-9.

Authors

Te Jui Yen¹, Andrei Gismatulin², Vladimir Volodin^{2

3}, Vladimir Gritsenko^{2

3

4}, Albert Chin⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electronics Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, 300, Taiwan.
² Rzhanov Institute of Semiconductor Physics, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia.
³ Novosibirsk State University, Pirogova street, 2, Novosobirsk, 630090, Russia.
⁴ Novosibirsk State Technical University, K. Marx ave., 20, Novosibirsk, 630073, Russia.
⁵ Department of Electronics Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, 300, Taiwan. achin@faculty.nctu.edu.tw.

Abstract

Traditional Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM) is a metal-insulator-metal (MIM) structure, in which metal oxide is usually used as an insulator. The charge transport mechanism of traditional RRAM is attributed to a metallic filament inside the RRAM. In this paper, we demonstrated a novel RRAM device with no metal inside. The N⁺-Si/SiO_x/P⁺-Si combination forms a N⁺IP⁺ diode structure that is different from traditional MIM RRAM. A large high-resistance/low-resistance window of 1.9 × 10⁴ was measured at room temperature. A favorable retention memory window of 1.2 × 10³ was attained for 10⁴ s at 85 °C. The charge transport mechanism of virgin, high- and low-resistance states can be well modeled by the single Shklovskii-Efros percolation mechanism rather than the charge transport in metallic filament. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy demonstrated that the value of x in SiO_x was 0.62, which provided sufficient oxygen vacancies for set/reset RRAM functions.