Bipolar resistive switching of chromium oxide for resistive random access memory

This study investigates the resistance switching characteristics of Cr2O3-based resistance random access memory (RRAM) with Pt/Cr2O3/TiN and Pt/Cr2O3/Pt structures. Only devices with Pt/Cr2O3/TiN structure exhibit bipolar switching behavior after the forming process because TiN was able to work as an effective oxygen reservoir but Pt was not. Oxygen migration between Cr2O3 and TiN was observed clearly before and after resistance switching from Auger electron spectroscopy (AES) analysis. Both low resistance state, ON state, and high resistance state, OFF state, of Pt/Cr2O3/TiN structures are stable and reproducible during a successive resistive switching. The resistance ratio of ON and OFF state is over 102, on top of that, the retention properties of both states are very stable after 104 s with a voltage of −0.2 V.

Research highlights
► This study investigates the resistance switching characteristics of Cr2O3-based resistance random access memory (RRAM) with Pt/Cr2O3/TiN and Pt/Cr2O3/Pt structures. Only devices with Pt/Cr2O3/TiN structure exhibit bipolar switching behavior after the forming process because TiN was able to work as an effective oxygen reservoir but Pt was not. Oxygen migration between Cr2O3 and TiN was observed clearly before and after resistance switching from Auger electron spectroscopy (AES) analysis. Both low resistance state, ON state, and high resistance state, OFF state, of Pt/Cr2O3/TiN structures are stable and reproducible during a successive resistive switching. The resistance ratio of ON and OFF state is over 102, on top of that, the retention properties of both states are very stable after 104 seconds with a voltage of −0.2V.