Thin-Silicon Injector (TSI): an All-Silicon Engineered Barrier, Highly Nonlinear Selector for High Density Resistive RAM Applications

Abstract

We report on a novel Thin-Silicon Injector (TSI) selector concept with bidirectional operation for high density resistive switching memory. Model-based analysis shows how the current drive-nonlinearity trade-off can be broken by properly combining physical material properties to enable decoupling control parameters of the current injection from those of selectivity. We demonstrate experimentally structures down to 40nm-size, featuring a high-drive current of similar to 1MA/cm(2), high current-voltage half-bias nonlinearity exceeding 6.10(3) at maximum current drive and very good reliability of > 10(7) cy endurance, with limited degradation of the selectivity. The selector has below 20nm thickness and it is fully implementable with readily available BEOL CMOS-compatible materials and processes.