Filament Formation in an Electrochemical SiO2-Based Memory Device During the Forming Process

Voltage sweep (VS) and current sweep (CS) methods were adopted to initialize an electrochemical SiO₂-based memory device and their influence on the resistive switching behavior was investigated. The VS method induced a large current overshoot during the forming process, which caused uncertain filament formation. The conducting filament formation was determined by the limitation current and current overshoot during the forming process. In contrast, the CS method with an appropriate limitation current can prevent the current overshoot and may form a single filament within the SiO₂ layer. When measuring the statistics of conducting filament formation, it was found that the CS method benefits from a much higher reuse probability in comparison with the VS method. Therefore, it can be said that the CS method improved the switching dispersion.