Joule heating effects in nanoscale carbon-based memory devices

One of the emerging candidates to bridge the gap between fast but volatile DRAM and non-volatile but slow storage devices is tetrahedral amorphous carbon (ta-C) based memory [1]-[3]. This offers a very good scalability, data retention and sub-5ns switching [2], [3]. Amorphous carbon memory devices can be electrically and optically switched from a high resistance state (HRS) to a low resistance state (LRS) [4]. The electrical conduction in the LRS is thought to be through sp2 clusters that form a conductive filament [4].