Review of Manufacturing Process Defects and Their Effects on Memristive Devices

Abstract

Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology has been scaled down over the last forty years making possible the design of high-performance applications, following the predictions made by Gordon Moore and Robert H. Dennard in the 1970s. However, there is a growing concern that device scaling, while maintaining cost-effective production, will become infeasible below a certain feature size. In parallel, emerging applications including Internet-of-Things (IoT) and big data applications present high demands in terms of storage and computing capability, combined with challenging constraints in terms of size, power consumption and response latency. In this scenario, memristive devices have become promising candidates to complement the CMOS technology due to their CMOS manufacturing process compatibility, great scalability and high density, zero standby power consumption and their capacity to implement high density memories as well as new computing paradigms. Despite these advantages, memristive devices are also susceptible to manufacturing defects that may cause unique faulty behaviors that are not seen in CMOS, increasing significantly the complexity of test procedures. This paper provides a review about the manufacturing process of memristives devices, focusing on Valence Change Mechanism (VCM)-based memristive devices, and a comparative analysis of the CMOS and memristive device manufacturing processes. Moreover, this paper identifies possible manufacturing failure mechanisms that may affect these novel devices, completing the list of the already known mechanisms, and provides a discussion about possible faulty behaviors. Note that the identification of these mechanisms provides insights regarding the possible memristive devices’ defective behaviors, enabling to derive more accurate fault models and consequently, more suitable test procedures.

Morphology Study of the Corrosion Rate on Weld Joint of Double Side Friction Stir Welding Aluminum Alloy AA6061

“…Defects are one of the failures in the fabrication process [1]. The defect trigger needs to be researched and investigated by analyzing the failure [2].…”

A New Reconfigurable True Random Number Generator and Physical Unclonable Function Unified Chip With On-Chip Auto-Calibration

“…Rai [19] proposed a memristor-based TRNG and PUF unified design. Memristor devices are prone to manufacturing defects that have known to cause unique faulty behaviors [20]. Unfortunately, only simulation results were provided, which are inadequate to attest the quality of hardware-intrinsic security primitives.…”

Exploring an On-Chip Sensor to Detect Unique Faults in RRAMs

“…Despite the lack of information regarding realistic manufacturing deviations, literature already describes that Resistive Random Access Memories (RRAMs) can be affected by unique faults [4]- [6], consequently demanding the development of new manufacturing test procedures [7], [8]. In [9], the authors provide a review of the memristive device manufacturing process and a discussion related to the possible defects that may affect these novel devices, identifying the relation between manufacturing failure mechanisms and faulty behaviors. Also, in the last few years, some manufacturing test strategies were proposed in the literature.…”