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 HfO_x RRAM in this work. We show that the resistance of the low-resistance state (LRS), the set voltage V_set and the reset voltage V_reset 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.