Characterizing Endurance Degradation of Incremental Switching in Analog RRAM for Neuromorphic Systems

Resistive random access memory (RRAM) is attractive for neuromorphic computing systems as synaptic weights. In the neural network training, incremental switching occurs between the analog conductance states, thus the analog RRAM devices have unique endurance degradation behaviors compared to the convention digital memory application. In this work, a fast measurement platform is developed to characterize the endurance of incremental switching in analog RRAM. It is found that under weak weight update pulses, the incremental switching cycles of RRAM can be increased for more than 5 orders of magnitude compared with full window switching under strong programming pulses. The 10
¹¹
-cycle endurance of analog RRAM is proved to be sufficient for training neural networks online for various datasets (from MNIST to ImageNet). However, the nonlinearity and dynamic range of analog RRAM degrade during cycling, which may influence the learning accuracy of the neural network when it re-trains with new datasets.