We investigate the resistive switching mechanism and the thermal stability in room temperature-fabricated nonvolatile memory consisting of W/TaOx/Pt. By comparing the chemical bonding of Ta 4f between high and low resistance states at W/TaOx and TaOx/Pt interfaces, the switching mechanism is confirmed to be dominated by the oxygen ions drift in the TaOx film. Besides, it is demonstrated that the resistive switching behavior is still dynamic and the resistance can be maintained at temperature as high as 510 K. We found that the resistive switching behavior of TaOx film exhibits little degradation even after annealed at 1273 K.

Quantized conductance was observed in an anion-migration-based resistive switching memory cell with the structure of (Ti, Ta, W)/Ta2O5/Pt. The conductance of the cell varies stepwise in units of single atomic conductance (77.5 μS), which is responsible for the formation and annihilation of atomic scale filament built from oxygen vacancies in Ta2O5 film. The quantized conductance behavior can be modulated by voltage pulses as fast as 100 ns. The demonstration of conductance quantization in Ta2O5 based memory device would open the door for quantized multi-bit data storage of anion-migration-based resistive switching nonvolatile memories.

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We report a resistive switching memory structure based on silicon wafers by employing both materials and processing fully compatible with complementary metal-oxide semiconductor technology. A SiOx nanolayer was fabricated by direct plasma-oxidation of silicon wafers at room-temperature. Resistive switching behaviors were investigated on both p- and n-Si wafers, whereas self-rectifying effect was obtained in the Cu/SiOx/n-Si structure at low-resistance state. The self-rectifying effect was explained by formation of the Schottky barrier between the as-formed Cu filament and the n-Si. These results suggest a convenient and cost-efficient technical-route to develop high-density resistive switching memory for nowadays Si-based semiconductor industry.

We report a bistable resistance switching effect in amorphous InGaZnO (a-IGZO) thin films deposited by a pulsed laser deposition method. The electrical properties of a-IGZO thin films were controlled by the oxygen partial pressure during deposition and this determined the resistance switching effect. We also observed the resistance switching effect with various electrodes such as Pt, Au, and Al. We suggest that the resistance switching effect is related to the formation of a conducting path by metal and/or oxygen vacancy defects in the a-IGZO matrix.