Memristively Programmable Transistors

State-of-the-art Flash is currently the dominating non-volatile memory technology. Its operation principle is based on storing charge on a floating-gate. Advanced scaling of the device geometry required to decrease the floating-gate charge down to some tens of electrons. Thus, to ensure that information is stored for years, the leakage current of the gate-dielectric needs to be in the order of 10e-26 A. This ultra-low leakage current requirement is opposed to a high tunneling rate required for device programming. Thus, a tradeoff between state retention, programming speed, and endurance is made, which limits the device performance. Here we demonstrate a novel concept to overcome the limitations of Flash memories. Our concept is based on a memristive switch integrated within the gate-terminal of a transistor. In a sense, the operation principle is similar to floating-gate transistors, but the advantage is that ions instead of electrons are used for programming. Since the mass of ions is larger than of electrons, gate-dielectrics with higher leakage current levels can be used. Our results demonstrate the practicability of the concept in an experimental proof-of-concept study and are further supported by LT-Spice simulations. This work offers a guideline for development of scalable non-volatile memories providing high endurance and retention times, and fast programming speeds.