First-principles study of the formation and electronic structure of a conductive filament in ZnO-based resistive random access memory

doi:10.1088/1674-1056/23/12/127301

Abstract Oxygen vacancy plays a crucial role in resistive switching. To date, a quantitative study about the distribution of the oxygen vacancies and its effect on the resistive switching has not yet been reported. In this study, we report our first-principles calculations in ZnO-based resistive switching memory grown on a Pt substrate. We show that the oxygen vacancies prefer to be located in the ZnO (0001) plane, i.e. in the direction parallel to the film surface in the preparation process. These oxygen vacancies drift easily in the film when a voltage is applied in the SET process and prefer to form a line defect perpendicular to the film surface. An isolated oxygen vacancy makes little contribution to the conductivity of ZnO, whereas the ordering of oxygen vacancies in the direction perpendicular to the film surface leads to a dramatic enhancement of the conductivity and thus forms conductive filaments. The semiconducting characteristics of the conductive filaments are confirmed experimentally.

Keywords: first-principles calculations resistive switching conductive filament oxygen-vacancy ordering

Received: 30 July 2014
Revised: 30 August 2014
Accepted manuscript online:

PACS:	73.22.-f	(Electronic structure of nanoscale materials and related systems)
	73.61.-r	(Electrical properties of specific thin films)
	71.55.-i	(Impurity and defect levels)

Fund: Project supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province, China (Grant Nos. A2013205149 and E2013210133) and the Hebei Provincial Education Department, China (Grant Nos. ZH2012067 and 2011170).

Corresponding Authors: Chen Wei
E-mail: chen07308@mail.hebtu.edu.cn

Cite this article:

Zhao Jing (赵晶), Dong Jing-Yu (董静雨), Ren Shu-Xia (任书霞), Zhang Li-Yong (张礼勇), Zhao Xu (赵旭), Chen Wei (陈伟) First-principles study of the formation and electronic structure of a conductive filament in ZnO-based resistive random access memory 2014 Chin. Phys. B 23 127301


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First-principles study of the formation and electronic structure of a conductive filament in ZnO-based resistive random access memory

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