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Conductive Atomic Force Microscope Study of Bipolar and Threshold Resistive Switching in 2D Hexagonal Boron Nitride
A Ranjan1,2, N Raghavan3, S J O'Shea4
1Engineering Product Development, Singapore University of Technology and Design, 8 Somapah Road, 487372, Singapore. alok_ranjan@mymail.sutd.edu.sg.
Abstract:
This study investigates the resistive switching characteristics and underlying mechanism in 2D layered hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) dielectric films using conductive atomic force microscopy. A combination of bipolar and threshold resistive switching is observed consistently on multi-layer h-BN/Cu stacks in the low power regime with current compliance (I comp ) of less than 100 nA. Standard random telegraph noise signatures were observed in the low resistance state (LRS), similar to the trends in oxygen vacancy-based RRAM devices. While h-BN appears to be a good candidate in terms of switching performance and endurance, it performs poorly in terms of retention lifetime due to the self-recovery of LRS state (similar to recovery of soft breakdown in oxide-based dielectrics) that is consistently observed at all locations without requiring any change in the voltage polarity for I comp ~1-100 nA.
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