Investigation on resistive switching characteristics of SiC and HfOx stacked nonvolatile memory by microwave irradiation

In this study, we fabricated the resistive switching memory with HfOx/SiC bilayer structure and applied microwave irradiation (MWI) to the devices. For comparison the memory characteristics, we fabricated the as-deposited (as-dep) device and conventional thermal annealing (CTA) treated device through the same method. The HfOx/SiC ReRAM devices showed the typical bipolar resistive switching performance and stable DC endurance characteristics over 500 cycles. In addition, the MWI-treated device exhibited larger memory window and lower operating power than as-dep and the CTA-treated devices. Further, the MWI-treated ReRAM devices exhibited stable multi-level state by adjusting the reset bias and each level showed excellent retention characteristics for 10(4) s at a high temperature (85 degrees C), respectively. Therefore, the MWI-processed HfOx/SiC bilayer structure method is a promising fabrication technology for highly stable non-volatile memory devices on electronic systems.