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We report nonvolatile resistive switching in anodic niobium pentoxide thin-film memory cells. Highly dielectric Nb2O5 films were prepared at room temperature by the anodic oxidation of submicrometer-thick Nb films sputtered onto an Si wafer. After the electroforming process, Au/Nb2O5/Nb/Si sandwich memory cells demonstrate reproducible direct current and pulse mode switching between two resistance states with a resistance on-off ratio around 103. Low and high resististive states show ohmic conductivity and field-assisted Poole-Frenkel-type conductivity, respectively. Nonvolatile resistance storage was traced within 40 days to quantify retention characteristics of the Nb2O5 memristor. The low-temperature anodic oxidation of Nb was found to be feasible to fabricate high-density cross-point memory with 3-D stack structures.

In this paper, we have successfully fabricated poly-Si-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon (SONOS)-type poly-Si-thin-film transistor (TFT) memories employing hafnium silicate as the trapping layer with low-thermal budget processing (les600degC). It was demonstrated that the fabricated memories exhibited good performance in terms of relatively large memory window, high program/erase speed (1 ms/10 ms), long retention time (>106 s for 20% charge loss), and 2-bit operation. Interestingly, we found that these memories depicted very unique disturbance behaviors, which are obviously distinct from those observed in the conventional SONOS-type Flash memories. We thought these specific characteristics are closely related to the presence of the inherent defects along the grain boundaries. Therefore, the elimination of the traps along the grain boundaries in the channel is an important factor for achieving high performance of the SONOS-type poly-Si-TFT Flash memory

Experimental results on the ac characteristics of electro-formed Cr/p/sup +/ hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H)/V thin film memory devices are presented. The impedance spectrum of the memory switching device has been measured over a wide frequency range from 1 Hz-32 MHz while keeping the ac voltage amplitude below 0.02 V. Simulation of the measured impedance spectrum using an equivalent circuit indicates that the capacitance associated with a conducting filament tends to increase as the memory resistance decreases. This is explained on the basis of an activated tunnelling mechanism. Charge transport is dominated by electron tunnelling via metallic particles in the filament, and hence small changes in interparticle spacing influences the tunnelling process considerately, leading to changes in both memory resistance and effective dielectric constant.