Picosecond Femtojoule Resistive Switching in Nanoscale VO${}_2$ Memristors

Abstract

Beyond-Moore computing technologies are expected to provide a sustainable alternative to the von Neumann approach not only due to their down-scaling potential but also via exploiting device-level functional complexity at the lowest possible energy consumption. The dynamics of the Mott transition in correlated electron oxides, such as vanadium dioxide, has been identified as a rich and reliable source of such functional complexity. However, its full potential in high-speed and low-power operation has been largely unexplored. We fabricated nanoscale VO${}_2$ devices embedded in a broad-band test circuit to study the speed and energy limitations of their resistive switching operation. Our picosecond time-resolution, real-time resistive switching experiments and numerical simulations demonstrate that tunable low-resistance states can be set by the application of 20~ps long, $<$1.7~V amplitude voltage pulses at 15~ps incubation times and switching energies starting from a few femtojoule. Moreover, we demonstrate that at nanometer-scale device sizes not only the electric field induced insulator-to-metal transition, but also the thermal conduction limited metal-to-insulator transition can take place at timescales of 100's of picoseconds. These orders of magnitude breakthroughs open the route to the design of high-speed and low-power dynamical circuits for a plethora of neuromorphic computing applications from pattern recognition to numerical optimization.

References in corpus (8)

• Evidence for a Structurally-driven Insulator-to-metal Transition in VO2: a View from the Ultrafast Timescale
• Biological plausibility and stochasticity in scalable VO2 active memristor neurons
• Observation of Mott Transition in VO_2 Based Transistors
• Instantaneous band gap collapse in photoexcited monoclinic VO${}_2$ due to photocarrier doping
• Electric-field-driven phase transition in vanadium dioxide
• Universal electric-field-driven resistive transition in narrow-gap Mott insulators
• Temperature and Electric Field Induced Metal-Insulator Transition in Atomic Layer Deposited Vanadium Dioxide Thin Films
• Picosecond Time-Scale Resistive Switching Monitored in Real-Time

Cited by in corpus (3)

• VO${}_2$ oscillator circuits optimized for ultrafast, 100 MHz-range operation
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