Voltage Divider for Self-Limited Analog State Programing of Memristors

Resistive switching devices—memristors—present a tunable, incremental switching behavior. Tuning their state accurately, repeatedly and in a wide range, makes memristors well-suited for multi-level (ML) resistive memory cells and analog computing applications. In this brief, the tuning approach based on a memristor-resistor voltage divider (VD) is validated experimentally using commercial memristors from Knowm Inc. and a custom circuit. Rapid and controllable multi-state SET tuning is shown with an appreciable range of different resistance values obtained as a function of the amplitude of the applied voltage pulse. The efficiency of the VD is finally compared against an adaptive pulse-based tuning protocol, in terms of circuit overhead, tuning precision, tuning time, and energy consumption, qualifying as a simple hardware solution for fast, reliable, and energy-efficient ML resistance tuning.