(Invited) Comprehensive Assessment of Oxide Memristors As Post-CMOS Memory and Logic Devices

Abstract

As CMOS technology approaches the end of its scaling, oxide-based memristors have become one of the leading candidates for post-CMOS memory and logic devices. To facilitate the understanding of physical switching mechanisms and accelerate experimental development of memristors, we have developed a three-dimensional fully-coupled electrical and thermal transport model, which captures all the important processes that drive memristive switching and is applicable for simulating a wide range of memristors. The model is applied to simulate the RESET and SET switching in a 3D filamentary TaOx memristor. Extensive simulations show that the switching dynamics of the bipolar device is determined by thermally-activated field-dominant processes: with Joule heating, the raised temperature enables the movement of oxygen vacancies, and the field drift dominates the overall motion of vacancies. Simulated current-voltage hysteresis and device resistance profiles as a function of time and voltage during RESET and SET switching show good agreement with experimental measurement.

Efficient Band-to-Trap Tunneling Model Including Heterojunction Band Offset

“…CHARON also contains many advanced physics models, such as Fermi-Dirac statistics, thermionic emission and tunneling transport across heterojunction (14), and band-to-trap tunneling. It has been used to simulate a wide variety of devices, including diodes, bipolar junction transistors (BJTs), heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs), field effect transistors (MOSFETs), wide-band gap devices (e.g., GaN devices), and transition metal oxide memristors (18)(19). CHARON is built upon the open-source Trilinos packages (20), which provide stateof-the-art nonlinear and linear solvers, cutting-edge MPI parallel capability, automatic differentiation, and much more.…”