Light- and Pressure-Stimulated Silver Oxide (AgOx)-Based Memristors for In-Sensor Memory and Computing Applications

This article reports a complementary metal oxide semiconductor-compatible fabrication and characterization of a silver oxide (AgOx) memristor where the AgOx active layer is sandwiched between two silver (Ag) electrodes, i.e., Ag/AgOx/Ag. The device demonstrates resistive switching (RS) having a Roff/Ron ≈ 28 (read at −0.17 V) with cyclic endurance of up to 100 cycles. The experimental demonstration of the device’s light- and pressure-modulated RS, while retaining its memristive capabilities, makes it promising for the next-generation human-inspired artificial intelligence technology with a low power consumption (0.012 mW in this work). This study shows that the Ag/AgOx/Ag memristor facilitates the integration of both the analog sensor and digital memory, where based on the applied potential and external stimuli (i.e., light and pressure) as inputs, the resultant current change in the device demonstrates reconfigurable “AND” and “OR” Boolean logic operations due to its nonvolatile RS property. Due to this ability, the device can be termed a “memlogic device”. Therefore, this device has the potential to be utilized not only in simplifying the next-generation programmable logic circuits, in-memory computing, and image processing but also in building memristive multifunctional optoelectronics and piezoelectronics.