ABSTRACT
164During the last decade, resistive random-access memories (RRAMs) based on metal oxide thin films have attracted great attention owing to their unique advantages, such as simple structure, faster reading and writing speed, smaller bit size, lower power consumption compared to existing nonvolatile memory technologies, etc. In particular, RRAM exhibits two resistances states (ON and OFF) that can be switched by an external bias or preserved as information and this process is referred as resistive switching (RS) process. The RS processes in metal oxides are usually limited to a small region near the interfaces between the electrodes and the oxides layer; therefore, the understanding of the interfaces and growth of nanometer scale oxide films are extremely desirable. Meanwhile, there is a barrier that the current photo lithography tools for making nanoscale features (top-down approaches) are prohibitively costly and complicated. Therefore, this book chapter will mainly focus to review the recent progress in the development of solution processed novel metal oxide thin films with improved RS performances via appropriate materials design, defect engineering, and interface engineering.
The main body of the chapter comprises two portions. In the first half, after brief introduction of RRAMs, the RS phenomenon which had been highlighted in many reports so far will be reviewed in detail. In the remaining half, a detailed description of various solution chemistry-driven schemes including chemical bath deposition (CBD), sol-gel, electrochemical deposition, and hydrothermal processes for the fabrication of metal oxides RRAMs will be presented.
