Voltage driving or current driving: Which is preferred for RRAM programming?

Voltage driving is a commonly used method to program the resistive switching memory. However, a question of whether voltage driving or current driving is preferred has never been answered. For periphery circuit design, one should first consider which kind of source should be adopted. In this work, we systematically evaluated the performance of Cu/HfO₂/Pt memory device by using current sweeping or voltage sweeping to SET and RESET. The results show that, tight distribution of R_off and V_set can be achieved by using current driving to RESET, with effectively eliminating the intermediate resistance states. The possible reason for this improvement may arise from a positive-feedback of joule heat generation during RESET process. Besides, uniform R_on distribution can also be realized by current driving, due to more localized conductive filaments formation. The results demonstrate that the current driving method is an effective way to solve the uniformity issue of RRAM.