ABSTRACT Resistive switching in oxide‐based memristor devices is governed by multiple physical and electrochemical phenomena within the oxides. The statistical nature of the defect formation and charge transport make it challenging to control device characteristics, causing high switching and spatial variation. Therefore, improving the quality of the oxide layer by a controlled deposition technique with low film surface roughness and high electrical uniformity is crucial to achieve stable switching characteristics and to reduce cycles and device variation. In this work, we show that the electrical uniformity of Ta 2 O 5 film and its resistive switching performance can be improved by co‐sputtering the Ta 2 O 5 layer with Cu. The in situ implanted approach improves the film uniformity and helps achieve lower forming voltages. In contrast to Ta 2 O 5 ‐based memristors, the Cu‐doped Ta 2 O 5 ‐based devices exhibit more reliable switching with low cycle‐to‐cycle and device‐to‐device variability by reducing the standard deviation and coefficient of variation in SET and RESET voltages. The high resistance and low resistance values are found more stable with minimal spatial variation. Moreover, the proposed devices exhibit sub‐10 ns switching speed and multiple resistive states, demonstrating great potential for neuromorphic and computation‐in‐memory applications.
Chen et al. (Sun,) studied this question.