Temperature and field-dependent transport measurements in continuously tunable tantalum oxide memristors expose the dominant state variable

Applications of memristor devices are quickly moving beyond computer memory to areas of analog and neuromorphic computation. These applications require the design of devices with different characteristics from binary memory, such as a large tunable range of conductance. A complete understanding of the conduction mechanisms and their corresponding state variable(s) is crucial for optimizing performance and designs in these applications. Here we present measurements of low bias I-V characteristics of 6 states in a Ta/tantalum-oxide (TaOx)/Pt memristor spanning over 2 orders of magnitude in conductance and temperatures from 100K to 500 K. Our measurements show that the 300K device conduction is dominated by a temperatureinsensitive current that varies with non-volatile memristor state, with an additional leakage contribution from a thermally-activated current channel that is nearly independent of the memristor state. We interpret these results with a parallel conduction model of Mott hopping and Schottky emission channels, fitting the voltage and temperature dependent experimental data for all memristor states with only two free parameters. The memristor conductance is linearly correlated with N, the density of electrons near EF participating in the Mott hopping conduction, revealing N to be the dominant state variable for low bias conduction in this system. Finally, we show that the Mott hopping sites can be ascribed to oxygen vacancies, where the local oxygen vacancy density responsible for critical hopping pathways controls the memristor conductance. Published by AIP Publishing.