Integration of Ag-based threshold switching devices in silicon microchips

Threshold-type resistive switching (RS) is an essential electronic behavior in many types of integrated circuits and can be exploited in multiple applications, such as leaky integrate-and-fire neurons for artificial neural networks (ANNs). Many research articles have shown that metal/insulator/metal (MIM) devices using Ag electrodes exhibit stable threshold-type RS, but all of them presented large devices (>1 µm²) fabricated on unfunctional SiO₂/Si substrates. In this article, for the first time we integrate Ag-based threshold-type RS devices at the back-end-of-line interconnections of silicon microchips. The insulator used is multilayer hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), and the size of the devices is ∼0.05 µm². The devices can switch between a high resistive state (HRS) and a low resistive state (LRS) without the need of any forming process, and we observe a high endurance over 1 million cycles over multiple devices. By performing circuit simulation using SPICE software, we confirm that this electrical behavior is suitable for being used as leaky integrate-and-fire electronic neuron in spiking neural networks for image recognition, and the h-BN artificial neurons operate correctly for 94 % of the images presented. Our study represents a significant advancement towards the integration of Ag-based threshold-type RS devices in silicon microchips.