Oxide-based RRAM: Uniformity improvement using a new material-oriented methodology

For the first time, a new technical solution is presented to essentially improve the uniformity of oxide based RRAM devices by using material design methodology based on first principle calculations. The results indicate that doping of trivalent elements such as Al, La, or Ga into the tetravalent metal oxides such as HfO₂ or ZrO₂ effectively controls the formation of oxygen vacancy filaments along the doping sites, which helps improving the resistive switching (RS) behaviors in oxide based RRAM devices. The improved uniformity of forming and set/reset behaviors in the Al-doped HfO₂ RRAM devices was demonstrated by both experiments and theoretical calculations, proving the validity of the proposed method.