Effective Reduction of the Programing Pulse Width in Al: HfO2-based RRAM Arrays

Adstract- The reduction of the pulse width used during the programming of RRAM devices is crucial in order to accomplish fast low-power switching operations. In this work, several pulse width values between 10 µs and 50 ns were evaluated by using the incremental step pulse with verify algorithm (ISPVA) on Al-doped HfO2 4 kbit RRAM arrays. 1k endurance cycles were performed to assess the switching stability, which showed a remarkable good behavior regardless the pulse width considered. Only the voltages required to perform the switching were impacted by the change of the pulse width. Nevertheless, the voltages needed for each pulse width remain stable along the 1k reset/set cycles. Finally, the data retention, after the endurance test, was evaluated at 150°C for 100 hours. Only a extremely slight increase on the degradation rate of 1 µA after 100 hours was reported between samples programmed by using pulse widths of 10 µs and 50 ns.