Electric‐Field‐Induced Resistive Switching in a Family of Mott Insulators: Towards a New Class of RRAM Memories

Abstract

[ # ] these authors contributes equally to this work Keywords: resistive switching, non-volatile memory, Mott insulator, metal-insulator transitionThe fundamental building blocks of modern silicon-based microelectronics, such as double gate transistors in non-volatile Flash memories, are based on the control of electrical resistance by electrostatic charging. Flash memories could soon reach their miniaturization limits mostly because reliably keeping enough electrons in an always smaller cell size will become increasingly difficult [1] . The control of electrical resistance at the nanometer scale therefore requires new concepts, and the ultimate resistance-change device is believed to exploit a purely electronic phase change such as the Mott insulator to insulator transition [ 2 ].Here we show that application of short electric pulses allows to switch back and forth between an initial high-resistance insulating state ("0" state) and a low-resistance "metallic" state ("1" state) in the whole class of Mott Insulator compounds AM 4 X 8 (A = Ga, Ge; M= V, Nb, Ta; X = S, Se). We found that electric fields as low as 2 kV/cm induce an electronic phase change in these compounds from a Mott insulating state to a metallic-like state. Our results suggest that this transition belongs to a new class of resistive switching and might be explained by recent theoretical works predicting that an insulator to metal transition can be achieved by a simple electric field in a Mott Insulator [3,4,5] . This new type of resistive switching has potential to build up a new class of Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM) with fast writing/erasing times (50 ns to 10 µs) and resistance ratios R/R of the order of 25% at room temperature.

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“…A 500-nm device array fabricated by photolithography is shown in Fig. 4a and a single (30 nm) 2 cell-size device fabricated by electron beam lithography is shown in Fig. 4b.…”

“…4a. Meanwhile, cell-size devices of (250 nm) 2 , (100 nm) 2 , (50 nm) 2 and (30 nm) 2 in Fig. 4e were measured in a device structure as shown in Fig.…”

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