Intact metal/metal halide van der Waals junction enables reliable memristive switching with high endurance

Organic-inorganic or inorganic metal halide materials have emerged as a promising candidate for a resistive switching material owing to its capability to achieve low operating voltage, high on/off ratio and multi-level switching. However, the high switching variation, limited endurance and poor reproducibility of the device hinder practical use of the memristors. Here, we report a universal approach to relieve the issues by using a van der Waals metal contacts (vdWC). By transferring the pre-deposited metal contact onto the active layers, an intact junction between the metal halide and contact layer is formed without unintended damage in the active layer that has been caused by a conventional physical deposition process of the metal contacts. Compared to the thermally evaporated metal contact (EVC), the vdWC did not degrade optoelectronic quality of the underlying layer to enable memristors with reduced switching variation, significantly enhanced endurance and reproducibility relative to those based on the EVC. By adopting various metal halide active layers, versatile utility of the vdWC is demonstrated. Thus, this vdWC approach can be a useful platform technology for development of high-performance and reliable memristors for future computing.