RTN based oxygen vacancy probing method for Ox-RRAM reliability characterization and its application in tail bits

Physical mechanism for Random-telegraph-noise (RTN) in oxide based resistive switching memory (Ox-RRAM) is proposed with new insight that the noticeable current fluctuation is attributed to the activation and deactivation of oxygen vacancy (V
_O
) in the filament gap region. Based on the mechanism, RTN based V
_O
probing method is first proposed to analyze properties of each V
_O
and detect the V
_O
count in the filament gap region. The proposed method can establish a connection between the microcosmic VO properties and the Ox-RRAM reliability. Using the proposed V
_O
probing method, we revealed that the tail bits of high resistance state originate from the redundant VO generation in the filament gap region in the ineffective RESET phase. Furthermore, an optimized operation scheme is presented to suppress the tail bits.