Thermal modeling of metal oxides for highly scaled nanoscale RRAM

Resistive random access memory (RRAM) is a promising candidate for future non-volatile memory applications due to its potential for performance, scalability and compatibility with CMOS processing. The switching in the RRAM cell occurs via formation of conductive filaments composed of sub-stoichiometric oxide (SSO). In this work, we model thermal conduction in a pair of neighboring memory cells, taking into account more detailed phonon scattering effects in the SSO than previously considered. We find that for devices scaled below 10 nm in bit spacing, the neighboring filament temperature can increase significantly even when only the phononic heat conduction is considered. This increase is underestimated if using the previous state-of-the-art model of thermal conductivity of SSO, i.e. linear interpolation between metal and stoichiometric oxide thermal conductivity.