By combining electrical, physical, and transport/atomistic modeling results, this study identifies critical conductive filament (CF) features controlling TiN/HfO2/TiN resistive memory (RRAM) operations. The leakage current through the dielectric is found to be supported by the oxygen vacancies, which tend to segregate at hafnia grain boundaries. We simulate the evolution of a current path during the forming operation employing the multiphonon trap-assisted tunneling (TAT) electron transport model. The forming process is analyzed within the concept of dielectric breakdown, which exhibits much shorter characteristic times than the electroforming process conventionally employed to describe the formation of the conductive filament. The resulting conductive filament is calculated to produce a non-uniform temperature profile along its length during the reset operation, promoting preferential oxidation of the filament tip. A thin dielectric barrier resulting from the CF tip oxidation is found to control filament resistance in the high resistive state. Field-driven dielectric breakdown of this barrier during the set operation restores the filament to its initial low resistive state. These findings point to the critical importance of controlling the filament cross section during forming to achieve low power RRAM cell switching.

Overcoming challenges associated with implementation of resistive random access memory technology for non-volatile information storage requires identifying the material characteristics responsible for resistive switching. In order to connect the switching phenomenon to the nano-scale morphological features of the dielectrics employed in memory cells, we applied the enhanced conductive atomic force microscopy technique for in situ analysis of the simultaneously collected electrical and topographical data on HfO2 stacks of various degrees of crystallinity. We demonstrate that the resistive switching is a local phenomenon associated with the formation of a conductive filament with a sufficiently small cross-section, which is determined by the maximum passing current. Switchable filament is found to be formed at the dielectric sites where the forming voltages were sufficiently small, which, in the case of the stoichiometric HfO2, is observed exclusively at the grain boundary regions representing low resistant conductive paths through the dielectric film.

Resistive switching (RS) phenomenon in the HfO2 dielectric has been indirectly observed at device level in previous studies using metal-insulator-metal structures, but its origin remains unclear. In this work, using the enhanced conductive atomic force microscope (ECAFM), we have been able to obtain in situ direct observation of RS with nanometric resolution. The ECAFM measurements reveal that the conductive filaments exhibiting the RS are primarily formed at the grain boundaries, which were shown exhibiting especially low breakdown voltage due to their intrinsic high density of the oxygen vacancies.

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