ABSTRACT
Memristive devices are an emerging new type of devices operating at the scale of a few or even single atoms. They are currently used as storage elements and are investigated for performing in-memory and neuromorphic computing. Amongst these devices, Ag/amorphous-SiOx/Pt memristors are among the most studied systems, with the electrically induced filament growth and dynamics being thoroughly investigated both theoretically and experimentally. In this paper, we report the observation of a novel feature in these devices: The appearance of new photoluminescent centers in SiOx upon memristive switching, and photon emission correlated with the conductance changes. This observation might pave the way towards an intrinsically memristive atomic scale light source with applications in neural networks, optical interconnects, and quantum communication.
ABSTRACT
Following the emergence of novel classes of atomic systems with amorphous active regions, device simulations had to rapidly evolve to devise strategies to account for the influence of disordered phases, defects, and interfaces into its core physical models. We review here how molecular dynamics and quantum transport can be combined to shed light on the performance of, for example, conductive bridging random access memories (CBRAM), a type of non-volatile memory. In particular, we show that electro-thermal effects play a critical role in such devices and therefore present a method based on density functional theory and the non-equilibrium Green's function formalism to accurately describe them. Three CBRAM configurations are investigated to illustrate the functionality of the proposed modeling approach.
