Chao
Zang‡
ab,
Bo
Li‡
ab,
Yun
Sun
*ab,
Shun
Feng
ac,
Xin-Zhe
Wang
ab,
Xiaohui
Wang
*ab and
Dong-Ming
Sun
*ab
aShenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 72 Wenhua Road, Shenyang, 110016, China. E-mail: yunsun@imr.ac.cn; wang@imr.ac.cn; dmsun@imr.ac.cn
bSchool of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, 72 Wenhua Road, Shenyang, 110016, China
cSchool of Physical Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, 393 Huaxiazhong Road, Shanghai, 200031, China
First published on 11th October 2022
For filamentary resistive random-access memory (RRAM) devices, the switching behavior between different resistance states usually occurs abruptly, while the random formation of conductive filaments usually results in large fluctuations in resistance states, leading to poor uniformity. Schottky barrier modulation enables resistive switching through charge trapping/de-trapping at the top-electrode/oxide interface, which is effective for improving the uniformity of RRAM devices. Here, we report a uniform RRAM device based on a MXene-TiO2 Schottky junction. The defect traps within the MXene formed during its fabricating process can trap and release the charges at the MXene–TiO2 interface to modulate the Schottky barrier for the resistive switching behavior. Our devices exhibit excellent current on-off ratio uniformity, device-to-device reproducibility, long-term retention, and endurance reliability. Due to the different carrier-blocking abilities of the MXene–TiO2 and TiO2–Si interface barriers, a self-rectifying behavior can be obtained with a rectifying ratio of 103, which offers great potential for large-scale RRAM applications based on MXene materials.
However, due to the stochastic nature of the filamentary resistive switching mechanism, the inevitable variability should be a primary obstacle for RRAMs.19,20 Theoretically, conductive filaments across the junction can be formed/ruptured by the redox process,21 migration of oxygen vacancies,11,22 or diffusion of atoms/ions of active metal electrodes,23 depending on the various metal oxide junctions.19,24–26 Nevertheless, switching between different resistance states is usually abrupt, and the random formation of conductive filaments usually makes large fluctuations of both resistance state and operating voltage, which greatly weakens the reliability of memory devices, and will either falsely program/erase the storage cell or make the storage states unrecognizable, imposing challenges to the peripheral sensing and programming circuits.19 Therefore, seeking a resistive switching mechanism that could eliminate the involvement of the prominent local conductive filamentary is impending for the development of uniform RRAM devices.
Another acknowledged resistive switching mechanism is the field-induced modulation of the Schottky barrier profile, which usually occurs on the entire interface between the electrode and oxide to improve the uniformity. It is well accepted that the interface state seriously affects the formation of the Schottky barrier, and the field-induced modification of the interface state contributes to the memory effect.27 The charge carriers injected from the electrodes may be trapped by charge traps in a storage medium to form a space charge, which can either modulate the barriers to injection of the charge carriers from the electrodes or affect the transport process of charge carriers through the storage medium, thereby leading to the resistive switching behavior.25 Furthermore, by inducing a Schottky contact or asymmetric barrier into a charge trapping/detrapping system, a charge-trap-associated self-rectifying RRAM can be obtained to deal with the sneak path problem that leads to the misreading, false program and additional power consumption in a high-density, massively parallel crossbar array.28–31 Therefore, designing a Schottky junction with abundant charge traps within the metal-oxide interface should be feasible to fabricate uniform self-rectifying RRAM devices.
MXenes are a new class of transition metal carbides or nitrides, which are widely used in electronic devices as electrode materials due to their excellent metallic conductivity and good hydrophilicity.32,33 It is worth noting that during the preparation of MXenes, when a certain A atomic layer is removed from the MAX phase precursor by hydrofluoric acid etching, some adjacent atoms will inevitably fall off, leading to the disordered anion–cation vacancies or vacancy clusters, which greatly increase the trap density of MXenes inherently.34–36 Recently, as the wafer-scale MXene film patterning with high resolution has been realized,37 it opens up new avenues for designing highly-active and long-life electrode candidates for fabricating uniform RRAMs based on the interface-trap modulation model.
Here, we report a uniform RRAM device with the MXene-TiO2 Schottky junction, while MXene and TiO2 are used as the top-electrode and resistive layer, respectively. The resistive switching behavior comes from the MXene-TiO2 junction, where the barrier profile is electrically modulated. The charge carriers injected from the MXene top-electrode can be trapped by charge traps within the MXene-TiO2 interface to modulate the barriers. As a result, our device exhibits the uniformity of current on–off ratio with a standard deviation less than 0.25, device-to-device reproducibility, long-term retention of 104 s, and reliable endurance. Moreover, by introducing the bottom electrode with silicon, a self-rectifying behavior can be obtained with a rectifying ratio of 103 due to the different carrier-blocking abilities of the MXene-TiO2 and TiO2–Si interface barrier.
A typically measured current–voltage (I–V) characteristic of the device shows that the self-rectifying behaviors are realized successfully with a rectifying ratio of approximately 103 (Fig. 1d). During the SET process, when the SET voltage (VSET) is approximately −2 V, the conduction of the resistive layer changes from a high-resistance state (HRS) to a low-resistance state (LRS), thereby switching the device to the ON state. During the RESET process, a RESET voltage (VRESET) of 2 V is applied to “erase” the device and causing it to return to the OFF state, with the conduction of the resistive layer changing from the LRS to the HRS, where the current is evidently suppressed. The rectifying ratio is calculated by the currents at −2 V and 2 V (ESI Fig. S2†). It is also appropriate to set the read voltage of ±2 V due to the stable read disturbance for HRS and LRS with a current on–off ratio of approximately 102 (ESI Fig. S3†).
To determine the appropriate device structure, a comparison of RRAM switching behaviors with different thicknesses of TiO2 as the resistive layer has been carried out, as shown in Fig. 1e, indicating that the optimum thickness of the TiO2 resistive layer is 5 nm. As a matter of fact, at the ON state, a thinner TiO2 film can result in the tunneling of charge carriers under the bias voltage, while a thicker TiO2 film can be considered as a good dielectric to impede the conduction between the top and bottom electrodes completely without any resistive switching behaviors (ESI Fig. S4†). An appropriate thickness is helpful for the construction of devices with a better rectifying ratio.38,39 In our study, as the TiO2 thickness increases, the Schottky barrier height and contact resistance can be reduced; however, the thicker TiO2 has a larger series resistance leading to the degradation of device performance at the contact.40 As a result, 5 nm-TiO2 should be just appropriate for obtaining the largest rectifying ratio by balancing the effects on the Schottky barrier height and series resistance simultaneously.
Fig. 1f shows the relationship between the resistive area and the performance of RRAMs extracted from the I–V characteristics of 10 devices each with different geometries (ESI Fig. S5†). Note that both the resistance of HRS and LRS decrease with the increased resistive area. Such an area-sensitive characteristic of the resistance states confirms the field-induced modulation of the Schottky barrier profile occurred on the entire MXene–TiO2 interface.4 In addition, the current of our devices with the smallest resistive area is more than 2 nA, which is big enough to read. In the practical chip design, even the current of fA level can be collected by adding auxiliary circuits, such as operational amplifiers.41–43
To verify the Schottky junction between MXene and TiO2, we directly connect two probes with MXene and TiO2, respectively (Fig. 2a). As a result, there is no rectifying behavior obtained in the case of either MXene or TiO2 connected with two probes. We directly measure the I–V characteristic of the TiO2–Si junction with a typical diode behavior (ESI Fig. S6†). When the MXene–TiO2 junction is tested, one probe is connected with the MXene and the other is connected with TiO2. Consequently, an obvious rectifying behavior is obtained, and we deduced that a Schottky junction is formed between MXene and TiO2 as a metal–semiconductor contact. Furthermore, several RRAMs using different metal materials as the top-electrodes have been fabricated to explore the importance of MXene, including Al, Ti and Au. As a result, no matter what kind of the metal top electrode is, no resistive switching behavior is observed for these RRAM devices (Fig. 2b) due to the lack of sufficient traps within the metal–TiO2 interface.44,45 Therefore, we clarify that the intrinsic traps of MXenes play an essential role in the switching of the resistance flow process.46–49
Switching retention and endurance are critical to evaluate the reliability of RRAM devices. As shown in Fig. 3a, the retention characteristics of the MXene-TiO2-Si RRAM show that the HRS is not significantly degraded after 104 s, but the LRS increases slightly. This is because the modulation of the Schottky barrier at the HRS is stable and easily realized. However, for the LRS, it suggests that some electrons may be injected from the MXene electrode and occupied the charge traps entering the interface. As a result, some positive charge traps are neutralized and the Schottky barrier within the interface is recovered leading to a slight increase in resistance. Moreover, the endurance characteristics show a stable operation of 100 cycles (Fig. 3b). Actually, our RRAM device could be also maintained beyond 100 cycles depending on how to set the pulsed voltage stress (ESI Fig. S7†). In addition, to predict the lifetime of our RRAM devices, we have investigated the retention and endurance characteristics at different temperatures (ESI Fig. S8†). It is explicit that the stable retention and recognizable on/off behaviors are still maintained. According to the Arrhenius equation, the activation value Ea of our device is calculated as 1.78 eV, and the extrapolated retention time of our device at room temperature could be approximately 108 s (ESI Fig. S9†), which is estimated by temperature-dependence of the retention time following the Arrhenius equation. In fact, there is little degradation of LRS at a higher temperature. This is because the stability of LRS is related to the activation energy of the material, and the greater the activation energy, the poorer the thermal stability of LRS.50 In addition, compared with some thermal-stability RRAM devices,51,52 the Ea of our RRAM device is a little larger leading to the degradation of LRS at a higher temperature. All these results can prove the high reliability of the MXene-TiO2-Si RRAM devices for long-term data storage.49
Fig. 3c shows the cumulative probability of 100 individual MXene-TiO2-Si RRAMs based on the resistance of HRS and LRS with a device-to-device variation less than one order of magnitude indicating the good uniformity. Fig. 3d illustrates the statistical distribution of rectifying ratio extracted from 50 individual RRAMs (ESI Fig. S10†). Due to the logarithmic operation, the mean rectifying ratio is actually 4 × 102 with a standard deviation of approximately 0.25. Moreover, we also provide the I–V characteristics of a RRAM with 80 switching cycles ((ESI Fig. S11†) and plot the statistical variation of rectifying ratio from cycle-to-cycle. As a result, the rectifying ratio only distributed from 102 to 103, indicating the excellent cycle-to-cycle uniformity (ESI Fig. S12†). The narrow distribution of switching voltages and resistance states illustrates the robust programming/erasing of the memory or making the storage states recognizable. Similarly, even though the bottom electrode is replaced by n-Si, the self-rectifying behavior and retention characteristics of the MXene-TiO2-n-Si are also achieved, indicating the excellent reliability and stability of MXene–TiO2 Schottky junction for fabricating the uniform self-rectifying RRAM devices (ESI Fig. S13†). All of these critical metrics can compare favourably with the reported TiO2-based RRAMs23,26,49,53–56 (ESI Table S1†).
As shown in Fig. 4a, when a relatively large negative bias is applied to the Schottky interface, electrons are extracted from the defect, resulting in the accumulation of positive charge traps at the interface, which changes the distribution of the potential at the interface. In order to maintain the suppression of the Fermi level position between MXene and TiO2, the height of the Schottky barrier at the interface is reduced leading to the decrease of the interface contact resistance, while the device is transformed into LRS; however, when a large positive bias is applied, a large number of electrons are injected into the interface and fill the charge traps, thereby neutralizing these positive charge traps and restoring the interface Schottky barrier, while the device transitions back to HRS.56–59
Fig. 4b shows the absorbance spectra, which demonstrate the bandgaps of TiO2 and p+-Si are 1.70 eV and 1.12 eV, respectively. Therefore, the self-rectification of the device is approved based on the basic energy band structure of each material (Fig. 4c), which is drawn through their work function and other parameters (ESI Fig. S14†).
When the device is negatively biased (Fig. 4d), it is easier for carriers to cross the Schottky barrier between MXene and TiO2, allowing more current to flow through the device in the ON state. Conversely, when the device is positively biased (Fig. 4e), it is difficult for carriers to pass through the Schottky barrier between MXene and TiO2 due to the different carrier-blocking abilities of the MXene–TiO2 and TiO2–Si interface barrier, resulting in the device self-rectifying behavior.60
In the case of n-Si, when n-Si contacts with MXene to form a Schottky junction, the holes as primary carriers cause the opposite built-in electric field inside this junction compared with p-Si. Therefore, under the same bias voltage, the voltage has the opposite effect on the device switching behavior.
Other chemicals used include remover PG (MicroChem), CD-26 developer (MicroChem), acetone, isopropanol and ethanol. All chemicals were directly used without any further purification.
Footnotes |
† Electronic supplementary information (ESI) available. See DOI: https://doi.org/10.1039/d2na00281g |
‡ These authors were equal major contributors to this work. |
This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2022 |