Resistive Switching and Current Conduction Mechanisms in Amorphous LaLuO₃ Thin Films Grown by Pulsed Laser Deposition

Abstract

The unipolar resistive switching characteristics of the amorphous LaLuO 3 thin films deposited by pulsed laser deposition have been studied. Reliable and repeatable nonvolatile switching of the resistance of LaLuO 3 films was obtained between two well defined states of low and high resistance with nearly constant resistance ratio ∼10 7 and non-overlapping switching voltages in the range of 0.66-0.83 V and 1.9-2.7 V respectively. The temperature dependent measurement revealed metallic and semiconducting behavior in low and high resistance states respectively. The switching between low and high resistance states was attributed to the change in the separation between oxygen vacancies in light of the correlated barrier hopping theory. The current conduction mechanism of the device in high-resistance state followed the Poole's law, whereas the conduction in low-resistance state was found to be dominated by percolation. The resistance of low and high resistance states of the film showed no obvious degradation for up to ∼10 4 seconds indicating good retention. The achieved characteristics of the resistive switching in LaLuO 3 thin films seem to be promising for futuristic nonvolatile memory applications.

Conduction Mechanism of Valence Change Resistive Switching Memory: A Survey

“…Under the circumstances, the resistive switching memory which based on resistance change modulated by electrical stimulus, has inspired both scientific and commercial interest due to its excellent area compaction (4F 2 , where F is minimal feature size), high switching speed (<100 ps) [3], high endurance (>10 12 cycles) [4], good retention (>10 years@85°) [5][6][7][8] and low power consumption (~1 µW) [9]. Numerous theoretical models and experiments have been proposed to explain the resistive switching behavior in various materials ranging from rare-earth oxides (e.g., YCrO3 [10] and LaLuO3 [11]), phase-change chalcogenides (e.g., Ge2Sb2Te5), solid-state electrolytes (e.g., Au/Cu in GeSe) to transition metal oxide (e.g., TiO2 and SrTiO3) [12]. Among these materials, binary transition metal oxides (TMOs) are widely agreed to be the most promising materials [13].…”