Confining Cation Injection to Enhance CBRAM Performance by Nanopore Graphene Layer

Conductive-bridge random access memory (CBRAM) is considered a strong contender of the next-generation nonvolatile memory technology. Resistive switching (RS) behavior in CBRAM is decided by the formation/dissolution of nanoscale conductive filament (CF) inside RS layer based on the cation injection from active electrode and their electrochemical reactions. Remarkably, RS is actually a localized behavior, however, cation injects from the whole area of active electrode into RS layer supplying excessive cation beyond the requirement of CF formation, leading to deterioration of device uniformity and reliability. Here, an effective method is proposed to localize cation injection into RS layer through the nanohole of inserted ion barrier between active electrode and RS layer. Taking an impermeable monolayer graphene as ion barrier, conductive atomic force microscopy results directly confirm that CF formation is confined through the nanohole of graphene due to the localized cation injection. Compared with the typical Cu/HfO₂ /Pt CBRAM device, the novel Cu/nanohole-graphene/HfO₂ /Pt device shows improvement of uniformity, endurance, and retention characteristics, because the cation injection is limited by the nanohole graphene. Scaling the nanohole of ion barrier down to several nanometers, the single-CF-based CBRAM device with high performance is expected to achieve by confining the cation injection at the atomic scale.