Self‐Rectifying Second Order Memristive Behavior in WO ₃ Films for Neuromorphic Computing Applications

Brain‐inspired neuromorphic computing paves an alternative to the Von Neumann bottleneck on implementing highly efficient and parallel processing hardware. However, in a crossbar array architecture, crosstalk occurs between devices. To address this issue, in this study, a Pt/WO 3 /FTO self‐rectifying memristor was fabricated using pulsed laser deposition, exhibiting a rectification ratio ≈10 3 , endurance of 5 × 10 3 cycles, negligible device‐to‐device variability, highly stable up to 25 cycles, energy consumption of 1.1 pJ/µm 2 in writing operation, and excellent synaptic behavior without any additional material engineering. This study comprehensively investigates the neuromorphic computing characteristics of the fabricated Pt/WO 3 /FTO structure. The conduction mechanism was explained using charge trapping/detrapping and Schottky barrier formation at the Pt/WO 3 interface, resulting in excellent rectification behavior. Interestingly, the fabricated structure exhibited second‐order memristive behavior, attributed to internal ion dynamics. The neuromorphic computing characteristics were comprehensively assessed using artificial neural network simulations, and fabricated devices achieved 90% accuracy on the MNIST handwritten digits dataset and 75% accuracy on the Fashion‐MNIST dataset, thus emulating synaptic functionality and showing excellent potential of the fabricated devices in real‐world artificial intelligence applications.