Ionic–electronic dynamics in an electrochemical gate stack toward high-speed artificial synapses

Abstract

Despite their great synaptic potential, the trade-off between programming speed and energy consumption of electrochemical random-access memory (ECRAM) devices are major hindrance to their incorporation into practical applications. In this work, we experimentally study the main limiting factor for high-speed programming of ECRAMs, the ionic current in the gate stack. We use two-terminal structures composed of LiCoO2/Li3PO4/amorphous-Si to represent the ECRAM gate stack (reservoir/electrolyte/channel). We perform electrical characterization including impedance spectroscopy (small-signal) and large-signal transient measurements across nine orders of magnitude in the time domain. We find that at the sub-microseconds range, the current is governed by the energy barrier for Li+ ions at the electrolyte interfaces. After a period of ∼1 μs, ionic migration through the ∼80 nm electrolyte layer dictates the current. At ∼50 μs, the ionic double layer at the interface is fully charged and the gate current drops by several orders of magnitude, indicating that the Li3PO4/Si interface is saturated, and the measured current is dominated by the electronic leakage component. Furthermore, we evaluate ECRAM performance under various pulse parameters. Our predictions show that an aggressively scaled (atomically thin) channel having a low carrier density of ∼1011 cm−2 can be programmed at ∼nanosecond using a gate current of ∼100 A/cm2.