Abstract
We report the effect of nitrogen implantation on the resistance switching of tetrahedral amorphous carbon (ta-C) films. Both unimplanted and implanted films show resistive switching, with a characteristic threshold voltage required to switch the films from the high-resistance to the low-resistance state. The switching voltages for the unimplanted films are between 7 and 10 V for ta-C films of thickness 15 to 40 nm. These are significantly reduced upon implantation by up to 60% when using an implantation dose ~3 × 1015 cm−2. We attribute this to increased sp2 bonding and clustering in the implanted films. This demonstrates the importance of sp2 clustering for resistive-switching in sp3-rich ta-C films.
Highlights
Non-volatile resistive-switching (RS) memories are promising alternatives to traditional Si-based memories, such as dynamic resistive random access memory (DRAM) and Flash, since they potentially offer scalability to nanometre dimensions [1,2], along with fast (< 10 ns) [3], low-power switching [3], as well as a simple twoterminal device configuration [1,2,3]
The basic operating scheme of RSbased devices is as follows [3]: for binary memory applications, the active material is electrically switched between a high-resistance (HRS or RESET) and a low-resistance (LRS or SET) state by the application of a voltage; readout is carried out at a voltage well below that required for switching
Advanced functionalities, such as multi-state memory [4,5], logic [4], arithmetic [6] and neuromorphic processing can be obtained by exploiting intermediate resistive states and a ‘plasticity’ inherent in many RS materials [3,4,5,6]
Summary
Non-volatile resistive-switching (RS) memories are promising alternatives to traditional Si-based memories, such as dynamic resistive random access memory (DRAM) and Flash, since they potentially offer scalability to nanometre dimensions [1,2], along with fast (< 10 ns) [3], low-power switching (pJ range) [3], as well as a simple twoterminal device configuration [1,2,3]. The basic operating scheme of RSbased devices is as follows [3]: for binary memory applications, the active material is electrically switched between a high-resistance (HRS or RESET) and a low-resistance (LRS or SET) state by the application of a voltage; readout is carried out at a voltage well below that required for switching. [24, 26] reported write endurance, i.e. the number of times the memory can be switched between states before one of the states becomes irreversible, > 1000, along with studies of scalability down to cell sizes ~100 nm in W/ta-C/Pt devices. We find that implantation helps facilitate the SET process, reducing the characteristic threshold voltage required to switch the devices We attribute this to the effect of nitrogen implantation on the number and distribution of sp clusters in the implanted films, demonstrating their importance for RS in sp3-rich ta-C films
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