Study On The Performance Of Tantalum Oxide Thin Film Based Flexible Resistive Switching Memory

With the development of science and technology and the change of people's life style,people's requirements for the appearance and function of electronic products are increasing day by day.Portable,wearable,flexible and foldable electronic devices have gradually become the mainstream of more and more attention.Therefore,it is of great significance to carry out the research of flexible electronic technology.If the memory and information processing unit are integrated into the flexible electronic device system,it can not only realize real-time perception,but also help to reduce power consumption,improve computing speed and storage capacity,which plays an important role in accelerating the commercialization of flexible wearable devices.Among them,resistive switching memory has become a strong competitor of the next generation memory due to its high integration,fast reading and writing speed,low power consumption and easy compatibility with CMOS process.And it meets the technical requirements of integration in flexible memory,which is a research hotspot applied in flexible memory.However,the performance of the flexible resistive switching memory reported so far is still not as good as that of silicon-based devices,especially under the action of bending stress,its high/low resistance ratio,consistency,reliability,stability and other fast decay,even lose the resistance characteristics.This paper will carry out research on how to improve the"the flexible tolerance"of flexible resistive switching memory,and provide certain theoretical basis and integration scheme for obtaining flexible resistance memory with high mechanical ductility and good performance.In this paper,we fabricated a flexible resistive switching memory device with the structure of Ta/Ta O_x/Pt on the polyimide(PI)substrate.First of all,different devices were fabricated by changing the thickness of the resistive switching layer and then tested by bending.The experimental results showed that reducing Ta O_x thickness can improve the flexibility of the flexible memory.Ta O_x device with thickness of 5 nm could stabilize the cycle of 10~8 times under a bending radius of 2 mm and still maintain a cycle of 10~8 times after bending 10,000 times with a bending radius of 2 mm.Secondly,by increasing the oxygen partial pressure of the resistive switching layer,the device lost its electroforming-free characteristic.It was found that the endurance performance of the device that needed electroforming decreased significantly when the same bending test was performed on the device.The results showed that electroforming-free characteristic has a negligible effect on the flexibility of flexible resistive switching memory.Finally,to further explore the feasibility of integrating this device into actual flexible electronic devices,a 10?m×10?m crossbar array was fabricated on a flexible PI substrate by lithography.Through the same bending test,it was verified that the device had a good consistency in the surface of bending state,and the device could also stabilize the cycle of 10~8 times under the bending radius of 2 mm and after bending10,000 times with a bending radius of 2 mm,indicating that the crossbar device had the same excellent flexibility.In this paper,the effect of resistive switching layer thickness and electroforming-free characteristic on the flexibility of resistive switching memory is presented and verified,which provides a feasible idea for producing flexible resistive switching memory with better flexibility.