Charge transport mechanism in the metal–nitride–oxide–silicon forming-free memristor structure

Metal-nitride-oxide-silicon structures that exhibit memristor properties were obtained using the low-pressure chemical vapor deposition at 700° C. The fabricated metal-nitride-oxide-silicon memristor structure does not require a forming procedure. In addition, the metal-nitride-oxide-silicon memristor has a memory window of about 3 orders of magnitude. In our work, the charge transport of high and low resistive states in a metal-nitride-oxide-silicon memristor is analyzed with two contact-limited models and six bulk-limited charge transport models. It is established that the Schottky effect model, thermally assisted tunneling model, Frenkel model of Coulomb traps ionization, Hill-Adachi model of overlapping Coulomb traps, Shklovskii-Efros percolation model, Makram-Ebeid and Lannoo model of multiphonon isolated traps ionization and the Nasyrov-Gritsenko model of phonon-assisted tunneling between traps, quantitatively, do not describe the charge transport of metal-nitride-oxide-silicon memristor. We found that the main charge transport mechanism in the metal-nitride-oxide-silicon memristor in a high resistive state is the model of space-charge-limited current with traps. In a low resistive state, the charge transport mechanism is described by the space-charge-limited current model with filled traps.