Electric-pulse-induced reversible resistance change effect in magnetoresistive films

Abstract

A large electric-pulse-induced reversible resistance change active at room temperature and under zero magnetic field has been discovered in colossal magnetoresistive (CMR) Pr0.7Ca0.3MnO3 thin films. Electric field-direction-dependent resistance changes of more than 1700% were observed under applied pulses of ∼100 ns duration and as low as ±5 V magnitude. The resistance changes were cumulative with pulse number, were reversible and nonvolatile. This electrically induced effect, observed in CMR materials at room temperature has both the benefit of a discovery in materials properties and the promise of applications for thin film manganites in the electronics arena including high-density nonvolatile memory.

Emergent functions of quantum materials

“…Tiny changes in the electronic structure or band filling at electrode/oxide interfaces can change the total resistance of memory cells by decades 23 . The process of electrical injection/rejection of oxygen ions, which should induce a change in the band filling, is considered to be one of the plausible origins of the gigantic electrical resistance switching widely observed for transition-metal oxides, including the example of the CMR manganite, which is still at the early stages of research 24 . The ReRAM has been industrialized as a storage-class memory that is between high-speed and low-density DRAM (Dynamic RAM) and low-speed and high-density storage such as hard disc drives or solid-state drives based on flash memory.…”

Enhancement of Resistance Switching in Electrodeposited Co-ZnO Films

“…Therefore, the primary requirement for RRAM is to develop a material that possesses resistive switching effect. To date, a number of materials have been found to have resistive switching behavior, for example, ferromagnetic oxide (Pr 1−x Ca x MnO 3 ), doped perovskite oxide (SrZrO 3 ), and binary transition metal oxide (TiO 2 , NiO, ZnO, and Cu 2 O) [1,2,4,6,[8][9][10][11]. Among these materials, only the transition metal oxides are transparent to the visible light due to their large optical band gap.…”

“…Resistive switching random access memory (RRAM) has attracted enormous interests, due to its simple structure and compatibility with complementary metal oxide semiconductor technology [1][2][3][4][5]. In comparable with the traditional nonvolatile memories (flash), RRAM exhibits unique advantages including much faster writing rate, smaller bit cell size, and lower operating voltages.…”

A Family of Electronically Reconfigurable Nanodevices

“…Although there had been many prior reports of anomalous hysteretic behavior in the current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of metal/dielectric/metal systems, the connection to memristive dynamics was not made. In part, this was caused by the fact that most of the previous devices that had been built and tested also possessed some very strong nonlinear electronic transport property, [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] such as tunneling or rectification, that masked the memristive behavior of these systems. Here, we demonstrate that intentionally combining these two properties that are now associated with metal-semiconductor interfaces, namely memristive switching and nonlinear Schottky-like rectification, enables us to build a family of reconfigurable electronic devices [14] with interesting and useful properties for switching, memory, and logic.…”