Modulating Competition between Defect Generation and Annihilation in Dielectric Breakdown Showing a Full Range of Reverse, Diminishing, and Forward Area Scaling Trends

Recently, we demonstrated [1, 2] that the decades-long conventional area scaling law of dielectric breakdown (BD) can be reversed to overcome the scaling limit [3] for forming voltage (V) reduction in ReRAM devices. This is achieved by using hydrogen-plasma-treated Hf02 with bilayer stacks [1, 2]. Our newly developed physics-based statistical model [1, 2] has revealed that the hydrogen plasma process can modulate the competition between defect generation and annihilation processes while maintaining the weakest-link characteristics of filament formation. In this paper, we further expand our work to explore other area scaling schemes. By changing hydrogen-plasma expose times in single and bilayer stacks, we demonstrate a full range of BD area scaling trends from reverse to diminishing and eventually switch back to forward area scaling as well as conventional area scaling. The voltage acceleration effect of reverse area scaling is also investigated over a wide range of voltage and temperature stress tests and is shown to be reliably intact. We perform additional RVS tests under high temperatures (up to 200°C), showing excellent stability for all area-scaling schemes. Moreover, we have developed a new joint Gumbel minima-maxima model in good agreement with the V data.