Experimental and Theoretical Studies of Resistive Switching in Grain Boundaries of Polycrystalline Transition Metal Oxide Film

Abstract

Practical use of Resistive Random Access Memory (ReRAM) depends on thorough understanding of the resistive switching (RS) mechanism in polycrystalline metal oxide films. Based on experimental and theoretical results of NiO based ReRAM, we have proposed a grain surface tiling model, in which grain surfaces (i.e. grain boundaries) are composed by insulating and conductive micro surface structures. This paper reports the adequacy of our model to the NiO based ReRAM and universality of surface electronic properties in metal oxides of NiO, CoO and MgO. Experimental results of RS operating modes suggest that the resistance changes in the grain boundaries, supporting our model. First-principles calculation results suggest that our model can be adopted to other metal oxide materials and the RS from a low resistance to a high resistance can be caused at 1000 K, which agrees with previous experimental reports.