Effect Of The Pressure Exerted By Probe Station Tips In The Electrical Characterization Of Memristors

With the rapid development of the information age,emerging information technologies such as the Internet of Thing,Big Data,and Artificial Intelligence have an increasing demand for massive data collection and analysis,thus posing increasingly stringent requirements for existing data storage devices.As one of the Non-Volatile Memories(NVMs),the Resistive Random Access Memory(RRAM)is likely to become one of the candidates for the next-generation information storage technology,and as its basic component,memristors have also attracted widespread attention worldwide.As for the research work on the electrical characterization of memristors,effect of the pressure exerted by probe station tips in the electrical characterization of memristors has not been paid much attention by researchers,but it may lead to wrong judgment of electrical performance of memristors.Therefore,it is necessary to investigate the pressure effect of probes.This paper is based on the study of effect of the pressure exerted by probe station tip in the electrical characterization of memristors and consists of two parts with progressive relationship:1)the effect of pressure at room temperature;2)the influence of temperature on the pressure effect.Firstly,the first part indicates that when studying the performance of oxide-memristors by placing one probe station tip on its active area results in false electrical characteristics due to the uncontrollable contact force exerted by the tip on the Metal-Insulator-Metal(MIM)cell.The observed pressure effects are concentrated in the following areas:higher post-breakdown(DB)current,lower DB voltage,more uniform distribution of resistance values of low resistance state,and wrong bipolar resistance switching(RS)behavior.Memristors using active metal as the electrode are more susceptible to the pressure.For example,many devices exhibit short-circuit phenomenon,among which the memristor with Ag as the electrode is the main one.Secondly,in the second part,the memristors Ni/Al2O3/Ni were measured at 25?,75?,and 125?,respectively.The experimental results demonstrate that testing temperature could modify the electrical properties of the memristors and have a greater influence on the pressure effect of the probe.Its impacts are mainly reflected in the following aspects:enhancing the influence on the variability of device-to-device,reducing the mean values of the DB voltage of memristors and its numerical distribution being more dispersed,reducing the resistance values of the low resistance state of devices and expanding its numerical distribution range,and changing the distribution range and concentration degree of the resistance value of the high resistance state of the memristors.Effect of the pressure exerted by probe station tips in the electrical characterization of oxide-memristors is systematically studied in this paper and the influence of temperature on the pressure effect and electrical performance of memristors was further explored.The significance of this paper is to provide some reference for the subsequent researches on memristors and establishment of reliable evaluation methods,such as the influence of pressure on device performance parameters during the measurement process.