Modeling of Mean Barrier Height Levying Various Image Forces of Metal–Insulator–Metal Structure to Enhance the Performance of Conductive Filament Based Memristor Model

Memristor manifests resistive switching based memory as its inherent property. Simple nanoscale structure, nonvolatility, low-power operation, and fast computing make it viable to compete with the emerging memory technologies. In this paper, we design the mean barrier height of metal-insulator-metal structure by imposing various image forces on it. Parabolic, triangular, and rectangular nature of image force potentials are superimposed with reported rectangular potential barrier to see their impact in tunneling current. Results revealed that the triangular image force significantly lower the barrier and results in highest current density among other barriers. Parabolic image force shows a 40% improvement in current density at higher voltage range when compared with reported hyperbolic image forces, whereas rectangular image force yield least current. The resultant relations are deployed in the existing conductive filament based memristor model to investigate the pinched hysteresis I-V characteristics. To validate our design approach, we compared the results with reported experimental data of memristor as well as spice model of memristor, which includes hyperbolic image potential. It is inferred that parabolic image potential builds better agreement with reported data as compared to others and shows a maximum off-switching current 1.74 × 10
^-3
A and on-switching current 0.95 × 10
^-3
A. The improved model of memristor can be employed to various applications like neuromorphic computing, logic design, and memory design.