Pulsed cycling operation and endurance failure of metal-oxide resistive (RRAM)

Oxide-based resistive memory (RRAM) is under scrutiny for possible use for non-volatile storage and storage-class memory (SCM) complementing DRAM and SRAM. For SCM applications, set/reset times, variability and endurance are key concerns, which must be carefully understood to explore potential applications of RRAM. To that purpose we studied pulsed operation and endurance of oxide RRAM. We show that (i) resistance window (RW) is controlled by the negative voltage V_stop applied during reset, (ii) failure at high V_stop is due to negative set, causing filament overgrowth and RW collapse and (iii) endurance is independent of the pulse-width, which supports an Arrhenius model for endurance failure.