Non volatile memory with multilevel switching: a basic model

M.J.ROZENBERG, I.H.INOUE AND M.J.SÁNCHEZ

PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS

Año: 2004 vol. 92 p. 178302 - 178305

0031-9007

There is a current upsurge in research on nonvolatile two-terminal resistance random access memory (RRAM) for next generation electronic applications. The RRAM is composed of a simple sandwich of a semiconductor with two metal electrodes. We introduce here an initial model for RRAM with the assumption that the semiconducting part has a nonpercolating domain structure. We solve the model using numerical simulations and the basic carrier transfer mechanism is unveiled in detail. Our model captures three key features observed in experiments: multilevel switchability of the resistance, its memory retention, and hysteretic behavior in the current-voltage curve.