Built‐In‐Homojunction‐Dominated Intrinsically Rectifying‐Resistive Switching in NiO Nanodots for Selection‐Device‐Free Memory Application

Abstract

Intrinsically rectifying‐resistive switching (IR‐RS) has been regarded as an effective way to address the crosstalk issue, due to the Schottky diodes formed at the metal/oxide interfaces in the ON states to suppress the sneak current at reverse biases. In this paper, the authors report for the first time another type of IR‐RS that is related to the built‐in homojunction. The IR‐RS study is usually limited to macroscopic samples with micrometer‐order pad‐type electrodes, while this work is on NiO nanodots fabricated with ultrathin anodic‐aluminum‐oxide templates and acting as nanoscaled analogs of real devices. The NiO nanodots show high storage density and high uniformity, and the IR‐RS behaviors are of good device performances in terms of retention, endurance, switching ratio, and rectification ratio. The feasibility of the IR‐RS for selection device‐free memory application is demonstrated by calculating the maximum crossbar array size under the worst‐case scenario to be 3 Mbit.