A facile approach for reducing the working voltage of Au/TiO 2 /Au nanostructured memristors by enhancing the local electric field

• Published in: Nanotechnology Vol. 29; no. 1; p. 015205
• Main Authors: Bafrani, Hamidreza Arab, Ebrahimi, Mahdi, Shouraki, Saeed Bagheri, Moshfegh, Alireza Z
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England 05.01.2018
• ISSN: 0957-4484; 1361-6528
• DOI: 10.1088/1361-6528/aa99b7

Memristor devices have attracted tremendous interest due to different applications ranging from nonvolatile data storage to neuromorphic computing units. Exploring the role of surface roughness of the bottom electrode (BE)/active layer interface provides useful guidelines for the optimization of the memristor switching performance. This study focuses on the effect of surface roughness of the BE electrode on the switching characteristics of Au/TiO /Au three-layer memristor devices. An optimized wet-etching treatment condition was found to modify the surface roughness of the Au BE where the measurement results indicate that the roughness of the Au BE is affected by both duration time and solution concentrations of the wet-etching process. Then we fabricated arrays of TiO -based nanostructured memristors sandwiched between two sets of cross-bar Au electrode lines (junction area 900 μm ). The results revealed a reduction in the working voltages in current-voltage characteristic of the device performance when increasing the surface roughness at the Au(BE)/TiO active layer interface. The set voltage of the device (V ) significantly decreased from 2.26-1.93 V when we increased the interface roughness from 4.2-13.1 nm. The present work provides information for better understanding the switching mechanism of titanium-dioxide-based devices, and it can be inferred that enhancing the roughness of the Au BE/TiO active layer interface leads to a localized non-uniform electric field distribution that plays a vital role in reducing the energy consumption of the device.