Analysis of the resistive switching phenomenon in MOS devices for memory and logic applications /

• Autores: Marcos Maestro Izquierdo
• Directores de la Tesis: Rosana Rodríguez Martínez (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2017
• Idioma: español
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Jorge Francisco Suñe Tarruella (presid.), Daniel Arumi Delgado (secret.), Carmen García Almudéver (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Ingeniería Electrónica y de Telecomunicación por la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
• Materias:
  • Física
    • Electrónica
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en:  DDD  TDX 
• Resumen

  • In general, the continuous evolution, and improvement, of the technology has led to face new emerging challenges. Regarding the electronic field, one of the most relevant has been the Moore’s law which postulates “the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years”. To accomplish this postulate, researchers thought evident to start decreasing the devices dimensions. During several decades, this solution has allowed achieved the goals of the postulate. However, in last decades, physical limitations have been reached since device dimensions are in the atomic range. Moreover, problems originated from the device scaling such as short channel effects in MOSFETs have been observed. Consequently, the focus of the scientific community has turned into the exploration of alternative device structures or different phenomena that would overcome the different issues owing to the scaling.

    Concerning alternative phenomena, one of the most relevant has been the Resistive Switching (RS) phenomenon which has shown promising features to be implemented in many applications. This phenomenon is based on the capability of a dielectric layer to change its resistance (or conductivity) between two or more values, which show a non-volatile behavior, under the action of an electric field. Overall, these characteristics makes this phenomenon very suitable and promising for its application in digital logic where a new paradigm of computation based on this phenomenon is emerging, in the development of artificial neural networks emulating the behavior of the neuron part known as synapse, and in memory like the next generation of non-volatile memories.

    However, despite the great efforts of the scientific community in last half a century, there are several hot topics such as the deeper RS understanding, the analysis of reliability issues affecting RS behavior or the thorough investigation on new applications of RS based devices in which much more work must be done. In this way, the goal of this thesis is focused on increasing the RS phenomenon knowledge and studying its feasibility for different applications. Hence, RS phenomenon has been study both at device level, to analyze the phenomenon itself, and at circuit level, to analyze its application in memory and digital fields.