High on-off ratio improvement of ZnO-based forming-free memristor by surface hydrogen annealing.

In this work, a high-performance, forming-free memristor based on Au/ZnO nanorods/AZO (Al-doped ZnO conductive glass) sandwich structure has been developed by rapid hydrogen annealing treatment. The Ron/Roff rate is dramatically increased from ∼10 to ∼10(4) after the surface treatment. Such an enhanced performance is attributed to the introduced oxygen vacancies layer at the top of ZnO nanorods. The device also exhibits excellent switching and retention stability. In addition, the carrier migration behavior can be well interpreted by classical trap-controlled space charge limited conduction, which verifies the forming of conductive filamentary in low resistive state. On this basis, Arrhenius activation theory is adopted to explain the drifting of oxygen vacancies, which is further confirmed by the time pertinence of resistive switching behavior under different sweep speed. This fabrication approach offers a useful approach to enhance the switching properties for next-generation memory applications.