Influence of Copper on the Switching Properties of Hafnium Oxide-Based Resistive Memory

Abstract

Hafnium oxide-based resistive memory devices have been fabricated on copper bottom electrodes. The HfOx active layers in these devices were deposited by atomic layer deposition at 250 °C with tetrakis(dimethylamido)hafnium(IV) as the metal precursor and an O2 plasma as the reactant. Depth profiles of the HfOx by x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and secondary ion mass spectroscopy revealed a copper concentration on the order of five atomic percent throughout the HfOx film. This phenomenon has not been previously reported in resistive switching literature and therefore may have gone unnoticed by other investigators. The MIM structures fabricated from the HfOx exhibited non-polar behavior, independent of the top metal electrode (Ni, Pt, Al, Au). These results are analogous to the non-polar switching behavior observed by Yang et al. [2] for intentionally Cu-doped HfOx resistive memory devices. The distinguishing characteristic of the material structure produced in this research is that the copper concentration increases to 60 % in a conducting surface copper oxide layer ~20 nm thick. Lastly, the results from both sweep- and pulse-mode current-voltage measurements are presented and preliminary work on fabricating sub-100 nm devices is summarized.