Influence of the surface roughness of the bottom electrode on the resistive-switching characteristics of Al/Al2O3/Al and Al/Al2O3/W structures fabricated on glass at 300 °C

Resistive-switching devices based on Metal–Insulator–Metal (MIM) structures have shown promising memory performance characteristics while enabling higher density of integration. Usually, these MIM devices are fabricated using different processing conditions including high temperature thermal treatments that could lead to undesirable chemical reactions in the insulator material and at its interface with the metals involved. In this work, we compare the electrical characteristics of MIM devices (fabricated on glass at 300 C) that use aluminum or tungsten as bottom electrode (BE) in order to study the influence of a highly reactive (aluminum) or inert (tungsten) metal electrode on the memory characteristics. We found that the switching characteristics of Al2O3 (from a high-resistance state HRS to a low-resistance state LRS and vice versa), are highly dependent on the surface roughness of the BE, the thickness of Al2O3 and the current compliance (CC) which limits the electron density flowing through both top/bottom electrodes. 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.