Heavy Ion Radiation Effects on Hafnium Oxide-Based Resistive Random Access Memory

Hafnium oxide-based resistive random access memory (RRAM) (TiN/HfO2-x/Pt/Au) stacks were irradiated with 1.1-GeV Au ions with fluences between 1010and 1012ions/cm2and evaluated regarding pristine resistance, forming voltage, and data retention. Only for the highest fluence, the resistance of the pristine state and, in turn, the conducting filament electroforming, as well as the reset voltage, increased. Even for fluences as high as 1012ions/cm2, only a negligible percentage of the tested devices shows event upsets indicating extremely high data retention of hafnium oxide-based RRAM toward high-energy ionizing radiation.