Single-crystalline CuO nanowires for resistive random access memory applications

Abstract

Recently, the mechanism of resistive random access memory (RRAM) has been partly clarified and determined to be controlled by the forming and erasing of conducting filaments (CF). However, the size of the CF may restrict the application and development as devices are scaled down. In this work, we synthesized CuO nanowires (NW) (∼150 nm in diameter) to fabricate a CuO NW RRAM nanodevice that was much smaller than the filament (∼2 μm) observed in a bulk CuO RRAM device in a previous study. HRTEM indicated that the Cu2O phase was generated after operation, which demonstrated that the filament could be minimize to as small as 3.8 nm when the device is scaled down. In addition, energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) and electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) show the resistive switching of the dielectric layer resulted from the aggregated oxygen vacancies, which also match with the I-V fitting results. Those results not only verify the switching mechanism of CuO RRAM but also show RRAM has the potential to shrink in size, which will be beneficial to the practical application of RRAM devices.