Enhancing Resistive Switching Characteristics of MoS2-based Memristor through O2 Plasma Irradiation-Induced Defects

In this work, we report the tuning of resistive switching properties in MoS2-based memristors through varying durations of oxygen plasma exposure. Electrical transport measurements of untreated and plasma-treated memristors reveal that longer oxygen plasma treatment increases the low resistance state (LRS) current and memory window (MW) and reduces the SET/RESET voltages. Notably, graphene/MoS2-xOx/graphene memristor with 18% oxygen atoms exhibits a MW (ILRS/IHRS) of approximately 10, which is around 78.12× higher than that of untreated memristors. Despite the switching performance benefits, the excessive oxidation of MoS2 via O2 plasma leads to increased cycle-to-cycle variability and enhanced temperature dependency on the resistive switching characteristics. Furthermore, the near-linear modulation of conductance during long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD) in MoS2-based memristors provides the excellent recognition accuracy of approximately 90% in a 784×100×10 neural network for the handwritten MNIST dataset. The comprehensive performance evaluation of oxygen-irradiated MoS2-based memristors highlights their potential for large-scale crossbar memory and synaptic arrays. This study could also serves as a valuable reference for future research on controlled defect generation in memristive devices, paving the way for advancements in neuromorphic computing architectures.