Material engineering technique for SiOX-based embedded RRAM with CMOS compatible process

The resistive switching behavior recently observed in silicon oxide (SiO_X) makes this material attractive to embedded resistive random access memory (RRAM) fabrication due to process compatibility. In SiO_X-based RRAM devices, switching mechanism is closely correlated with defects in the oxides. Therefore developing a method to control the defects is necessary for performance enhancement. In this paper, a new material engineering technique for SiO_X-based embedded RRAM fabrication is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. Metal-Insulator-Metal (MIM) Al/SiO₂/TiN capacitor can be converted into RRAM device with nitrogen ion implantation, which is fully compatible with CMOS process. The doped MIM device exhibits stable bipolar resistive switching behavior with large OFF/ON ratio. Compared with PECVD SiO_XN_Y resistive switching device, this material engineering technique with better control of defects density is shown to improve the low resistance uniformity of the fabricated device.