A study of the relationship between endurance and retention reliability for a HfO-based resistive switching memory

This study determines the relationship between retention and endurance reliability for a HfOx-based resistive random access memory (ReRAM). A TiN (15 nm) / HfOx (6 nm) / Ti (10 nm) / TiN (40 nm) stacked structure is fabricated and tested to verify its basic characteristics and reliability. The high resistance states (HRS) retention behavior is characterized and is found to degrade over 100x on the endured bits because there is a sequential high temperature procedure. The degradation is reduced slightly to a 30x drop for the endured devices with one single refresh cycle. During the endurance and retention test procedures, the HRS resistance decreases because neutral oxygen vacancy filaments grow and this cannot be reversed. The I-V characteristics for endured devices are also determined. The results show that isothermal treatment causes a gradual SET and RESET process with multiple feasible states. The thermally induced filament degradation model (isolated filament vs. continuous filament) is verified by the relationship between retention and endurance reliability. Design guidance is recommended for an improvement in ReRAM reliability.