TY - JOUR
T1 - Temperature-Dependent Contact Resistance to Nonvolatile Memory Materials
AU - Deshmukh, Sanchit
AU - Yalon, Eilam
AU - Lian, Feifei
AU - Schauble, Kirstin E.
AU - Xiong, Feng
AU - Karpov, Ilya V.
AU - Pop, Eric
N1 - Funding Information: Manuscript received May 27, 2019; revised July 8, 2019; accepted July 10, 2019. Date of publication August 8, 2019; date of current version August 21, 2019. This work was supported in part by the Stanford Non-volatile Memory Technology Research Initiative (NMTRI), in part by Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) under Grant 2532.001, and in part by the National Science Foundation under Award ECCS-1542152. The review of this paper was arranged by Editor C. Monzio Compagnoni. (Corresponding author: Eric Pop.) S. Deshmukh, K. E. Schauble, and E. Pop are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 USA (e-mail: [email protected]). Publisher Copyright: © 2019 IEEE.
PY - 2019/9
Y1 - 2019/9
N2 - Emerging nonvolatile memories store data by reversible resistive switching in phase-change materials or metal oxides. As memory cell dimensions are reduced to 10-nm scale or below, electrical contacts can dominate the device behavior, yet are often poorly understood. Here, we study the contact resistance to memory materials Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST), TiO2, and HfO2 with low-current and temperature-dependent measurements. We find that the contact resistivity varies over ten orders of magnitude depending on the material; contact resistivity to cubic GST is near 10-2Ω · cm2 (1000 times greater than the hexagonal GST) while that to HfO2 is as high as 5 × 10^{{5}} Ω · cm2 at room temperature. Contact resistivity decreases with increasing temperature and with increasing current density, the latter due to the non-Ohmic nature of the contacts. These results are important to understand the design, scaling, and behavior of nanoscale data storage devices.
AB - Emerging nonvolatile memories store data by reversible resistive switching in phase-change materials or metal oxides. As memory cell dimensions are reduced to 10-nm scale or below, electrical contacts can dominate the device behavior, yet are often poorly understood. Here, we study the contact resistance to memory materials Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST), TiO2, and HfO2 with low-current and temperature-dependent measurements. We find that the contact resistivity varies over ten orders of magnitude depending on the material; contact resistivity to cubic GST is near 10-2Ω · cm2 (1000 times greater than the hexagonal GST) while that to HfO2 is as high as 5 × 10^{{5}} Ω · cm2 at room temperature. Contact resistivity decreases with increasing temperature and with increasing current density, the latter due to the non-Ohmic nature of the contacts. These results are important to understand the design, scaling, and behavior of nanoscale data storage devices.
KW - Contact resistance
KW - nonvolatile memory
KW - phase-change memory (PCM)
KW - resistive random-access memory (RRAM)
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85071263522
U2 - 10.1109/TED.2019.2929736
DO - 10.1109/TED.2019.2929736
M3 - Article
SN - 0018-9383
VL - 66
SP - 3816
EP - 3821
JO - IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices
JF - IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices
IS - 9
M1 - 8792376
ER -