Cycling-induced degradation of metal-oxide resistive switching memory (RRAM)

Resistive switching memory (RRAM) is raising interest for future storage-class memory (SCM) and embedded applications due to high speed operation, low power and non-volatile behavior. While cycling endurance is currently well understood, the impact of cycling on switching and reliability is still a matter of concern. To that purpose we study the cycling-induced degradation of HfOx RRAM in this work. We show that the resistance of the low-resistance state (LRS), the set voltage Vset and the reset voltage Vreset decrease with cycling, which we attribute to defect generation causing enhanced ion mobility. The degradation kinetics is modelled by an Arrhenius-driven distributed-energy model. Our study allows to predict set/reset voltages after any arbitrary number of cycles and for any set/reset cycling condition.