Electrical properties of AlSiOxAg thin film cathodes

Studies of metal–oxide–metal sandwich devices have been extended to include investigations of the effects of using silver for the top electrode, rather than gold as in most previous work. The use of silver markedly affects the electroforming and electrical behaviour of the devices. Forming occurs irrespective of the forming bias polarity and symmetrical I–U characteristics are generally observed. Switching between impedance states occurs in many devices but the electrical behaviour is less reproducible than with gold-electrode devices. Measurements show, that the hot electron attenuation lengths in silver increase with applied bias from 150 Å at 5 V to 450 Å at 20 V, in qualitative agreement with measurements on gold. The lack of reproducibility between devices suggests that the use of silver electrodes is not feasible in the development of memory devices or cold cathodes from this type of device structure.