From dielectric failure to memory function: Learning from oxide breakdown for improved understanding of resistive switching memories

Dielectric breakdown (BD) of thin gate insulators has been studied for decades due to its importance for CMOS reliability forecast and technology qualification. On the other hand, resistive switching (RS) phenomena such as threshold switching (TS) and memory switching (MS) are at the basics of promising post-NAND non-volatile memories such as phase-change memories (PCM) and resistive memories (RRAM). Many of these devices are based on the ON/OFF switching of a localized conducting filament (CF) which is created by a soft-breakdown event occurring during electroforming. Thus, many findings concerning the BD physics might be useful to improve our understanding of RS and be of great help for the development of new non-volatile memory technologies. In this work, we focus on three different areas where a link can be established between BD and RS: 1) the post-BD conduction properties and its relation to quantum-wire conduction in both TS and MS; 2) the application of the cell-based percolation model of the breakdown to the description of the resistive switching statistics; and 3) the application of the successive BD statistics to deal with the statistics of multiple CFs in RRAM devices which is related to a possible endurance limit.