Tag Archives: Pangiotis Dimitrakis

Memristor shakeup

New discoveries suggest that memristors do not function as was previously theorized. (For anyone who wants a memristor description, there’s this Wikipedia entry.) From an Oct. 13, 2015 posting by Alexander Hellemans for the Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers]), Note: Links have been removed,

What’s going to replace flash? The R&D arms of several companies including Hewlett Packard, Intel, and Samsung think the answer might be memristors (also called resistive RAM, ReRAM, or RRAM). These devices have a chance at unseating the non-volatile memory champion because, they use little energy, are very fast, and retain data without requiring power. However, new research indicates that they don’t work in quite the way we thought they do.

The fundamental mechanism at the heart of how a memristor works is something called an “imperfect point contact,” which was predicted in 1971, long before anybody had built working devices. When voltage is applied to a memristor cell, it reduces the resistance across the device. This change in resistance can be read out by applying another, smaller voltage. By inverting the voltage, the resistance of the device is returned to its initial value, that is, the stored information is erased.

Over the last decade researchers have produced two commercially promising types of memristors: electrochemical metallization memory (ECM) cells, and valence change mechanism memory (VCM) cells.

Now international research teams lead by Ilia Valov at the Peter Grünberg Institute in Jülich, Germany, report in Nature Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials that they have identified new processes that erase many of the differences between EMC and VCM cells.

Valov and coworkers in Germany, Japan, Korea, Greece, and the United States started investigating memristors that had a tantalum oxide electrolyte and an active tantalum electrode. “Our studies show that these two types of switching mechanisms in fact can be bridged, and we don’t have a purely oxygen type of switching as was believed, but that also positive [metal] ions, originating from the active electrode, are mobile,” explains Valov.

Here are links to and citations for both papers,

Graphene-Modified Interface Controls Transition from VCM to ECM Switching Modes in Ta/TaOx Based Memristive Devices by Michael Lübben, Panagiotis Karakolis, Vassilios Ioannou-Sougleridis, Pascal Normand, Pangiotis Dimitrakis, & Ilia Valov. Advanced Materials DOI: 10.1002/adma.201502574 First published: 10 September 2015

Nanoscale cation motion in TaOx, HfOx and TiOx memristive systems by Anja Wedig, Michael Luebben, Deok-Yong Cho, Marco Moors, Katharina Skaja, Vikas Rana, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Kiran K. Adepalli, Bilge Yildiz, Rainer Waser, & Ilia Valov. Nature Nanotechnology (2015) doi:10.1038/nnano.2015.221 Published online 28 September 2015

Both papers are behind paywalls.