Charge transport mechanism in the forming-free memristor based on silicon nitride

Nonstoichiometric silicon nitride SiNx is a promising material for developing a new generation of high-speed, reliable flash memory device based on the resistive effect. The advantage of silicon nitride over other dielectrics is its compatibility with the silicon technology. In the present work, a silicon nitride-based memristor deposited by the plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition method was studied. To develop a memristor based on silicon nitride, it is necessary to understand the charge transport mechanisms in all states. In the present work, it was established that the charge transport in high-resistance states is not described by the Frenkel effect model of Coulomb isolated trap ionization, Hill–Adachi model of overlapping Coulomb potentials, Makram–Ebeid and Lannoo model of multiphonon isolated trap ionization, Nasyrov–Gritsenko model of phonon-assisted tunneling between traps, Shklovskii–Efros percolation model, Schottky model and the thermally assisted tunneling mechanisms. It is established that, in the initial state, low-resistance state, intermediate-resistance state and high-resistance state, the charge transport in the forming-free SiNx-based memristor is described by the space charge limited current model. The trap parameters responsible for the charge transport in various memristor states are determined.

Electric field perturbed electron tunnelling in nonpolar organic glasses

Isothermoluminescence (ITL) and electrophotoluminescence (EPL) resulting from electron–cation recombination are measured in a 2-methylpentane–methylcyclohexane glass. The ITL is more characteristic of quantum-mechanical tunnelling and the EPL signal is markedly stronger in this new glass than previous measurements in 3-methylpentane. Quantum-mechanical tunnelling theory is used to predict recombination rates of electrons in the potential field of a cation plus an applied field. Numerical integration of the nonhomogeneous kinetic equations resulting from a distribution of cation–electron separations leads to qualitative and quantitative predictions of the EPL signal that are observed experimentally. Fitting of the theory to experiment supports the conclusions that the angular distribution of the photoelectrons about the cations is close to isotropic, that the electrons active in ITL and EPL on the time scale of minutes are separated about 50 Å from their parent cation, and that the trap ionization potential in this nonpolar hydrocarbon glass is in the range of 0.5 to 0.7 eV.