Tuning the resistive switching in tantalum oxide-based memristors by oxygen pressure during low temperature laser synthesis

In this work, we investigate the possibility of controlled tuning the resistive switching of the Pt/TaOx/Ta2O5/Pt/c-Al2O3 memristors in crossbar geometry by changing the oxygen pressure from 0.5 to 50 mTorr during the low-temperature laser synthesis. The stochastic process of nanoaystallite formation significantly affects the spread of memristor parameters. X-ray diffraction studies of the TaOx films with high resolution made it possible to determine the conditions for obtaining the active region of the memristor with the formation of certain size nanocrystallites. The presence of the nanocrystallites in the amorphous matrix of the oxide region of the memristor based on tantalum oxides makes it possible to improve the uniformity and reliability of the resistive switching with an increase in the memory window performance by an order of magnitude. The memristor showed very reliable resistive switching performance over 100 I-V cycles with the memory window performance of R-ON/R-OFF similar to 10(3) at RESET operating voltage of similar to 2.3 V. (C) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.