Picosecond Femtojoule Resistive Switching in Nanoscale VO₂ Memristors

Beyond-Moore computing technologies are expected to provide a sustainable alternative to the von Neumann approach not only due to their down-scaling potential but also via exploiting device-level functional complexity at the lowest possible energy consumption. The dynamics of the Mott transition in correlated electron oxides, such as vanadium dioxide, has been identified as a rich and reliable source of such functional complexity. However, its full potential in high-speed and low-power operation has been largely unexplored. We fabricated nanoscale VO₂ devices embedded in a broadband test circuit to study the speed and energy limitations of their resistive switching operation. Our picosecond time-resolution, real-time resistive switching experiments and numerical simulations demonstrate that tunable low-resistance states can be set by the application of 20 ps long, <1.7 V amplitude voltage pulses at 15 ps incubation times and switching energies starting from a few femtojoule. Moreover, we demonstrate that at nanometer-scale device sizes not only the electric field induced insulator-to-metal transition but also the thermal conduction limited metal-to-insulator transition can take place at time scales of 100s of picoseconds. These orders of magnitude breakthroughs can be utilized to design high-speed and low-power dynamical circuits for a plethora of neuromorphic computing applications from pattern recognition to numerical optimization.