Balancing the Source and Sink of Oxygen Vacancies for the Resistive Switching Memory

The high nonuniformity and low endurance of the resistive switching random access memory (RRAM) are the two major remaining hurdles at the device level for mass production. Incremental step pulse programming (ISPP) can be a viable solution to the former problem, but the latter problem requires material level innovation. In valence change RRAM, electrodes have usually been regarded as inert (e.g., Pt or TiN) or oxygen vacancy (VO) sources (e.g., Ta), but different electrode materials can serve as a sink of VO. In this work, an RRAM using a 1.5 nm-thick Ta2O5 switching layer is presented, where one of the electrodes was VO-supplying Ta and the other was either inert TiN or VO-sinking RuO2. Whereas TiN could not remove the excessive VO in the memory cell, RuO2 absorbed the unnecessary VO. By carefully tuning (balancing) the capabilities of VO-supplying Ta and VO-sinking RuO2 electrodes, an almost invariant ISPP voltage and a greatly enhanced endurance performance can be achieved.