| AVS 62nd International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Electronic Materials and Processing | Wednesday Sessions |
| Session EM-WeM |
| Session: | Beyond CMOS: Resistive Switching Devices |
| Presenter: | Karen Hsu, University of Wisconsin-Madison |
| Authors: | K. Hsu, University of Wisconsin-Madison T. Chang, University of Wisconsin-Madison L. Zhao, Stanford University R. Agasie, University of Wisconsin-Madison Y. Nishi, Stanford University Z. Ma, University of Wisconsin-Madison J.L. Shohet, University of Wisconsin-Madison |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
As the size of devices decreases and the complexity of electronic chips increases, cosmic-ray-induced crashes are becoming a severe threat to electronic circuits and devices. Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM) [1], which is considered as a very promising memory technology for embedded systems, has undergone intense research in both industry and academia in the last ten years. As RRAM technology matures and electronic devices using RRAM are likely to be built soon, malfunctions of RRAM will become an important problem in industry since the size of these devices will continue to decrease. Neutrons that come from earth bound or from cosmic ray sources are likely one to produce significant effects on the RRAM [2] based on their fluxes at terrestrial altitudes and their interaction cross sections. In this work, neutrons from the University of Wisconsin Max Carbon Radiation Science Center were used as the radiation source The neutron-induced effects on HfOX RRAM include single-event-upset (SEU), modification to forming voltage, resistance of both the high-resistance (HRS) and low-resistance states (LRS) and shifts in set/reset voltage.
Some RRAM cells can actually be formed during neutron irradiation and then switch from the HRS to the LRS after additional neutron irradiation. The SEU rate increases linearly as neutron fluence increases. For those neutron-irradiated RRAM cells that did not switch from the HRS to the LRS under irradiation, a smaller forming voltage was required after irradiation. In addition, an increase in the HRS resistance and better switching behavior was observed in those RRAM cells formed entirely by neutron irradiation.
Shifts in the set/reset voltage were also observed after neutron radiation. X-ray diffraction was used on HfO2 films to investigate the physical mechanism, which is attributed to atomic-structure changes in HfOx caused by neutron irradiation.
This work was supported by the Semiconductor Research Corporation under Contract No. 2012-KJ-2359, by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CBET-1066231.
References:
1. H.-S. Philip Wong, H-Y Lee, S. Yu, Y. S. Chen, Y. Wu, P-S Chen, B. Lee, F. T. Chen, and M-J Tsai, “Metal–oxide RRAM,” Proceedings of the IEEE100 1951 (2012).