Resistive switching in Al/Tb/SiO2 nano-multilayers

Abstract

Resistive switching mechanism in memristors offers wide novel properties for nanoelectronics devices. In this work, we report an Al/Tb/SiO2 nano-multilayer memristor. Our devices were fabricated in terms of electron beam evaporation with thicknesses in the order of nanometres. Our devices exhibit memristive behaviour with a high change in resistance which can be cycled up to 20 times at room temperature. The states can persist at least for 140 h. We report bipolar switching with set and reset voltages with a low dispersion during the cycling. We have also studied the impact of the compliance current. Additionally, we studied which conduction mechanism is carrying out the memristive behaviour of our samples, where an Ohmic conduction in the low resistance state is observed and a Schottky fit is applied at the high resistance state. Current-time characteristics of the devices is also shown, where fluctuations and the time of commutation are presented. Finally, we also report the structural characterization of another type of samples, where only the switching mechanism is the aim of study. We have supposed that valence change mechanism is the responsible for the switching mechanism