In addition, the future application of RRAM in aerospace or nuclear industry is full of potential. The major challenges in such applications lie in the radiation-induced degradation of RRAM performance. Radiation sources in the outer aerospace and

nuclear industries include X-ray and γ ray radiation, energetic electrons, protons, and heavy PD0332991 cost ion bombardment, etc., and they can bring displacement damages, radiation-induced charge LY2109761 solubility dmso trapping on oxide layers, radiation-induced tunneling leakage, soft breakdown, and hard breakdown [8–10]. Some studies have pointed out that a few kinds of RRAM materials have a good immunity to certain types of radiation, such as HfO2 [11, 12], TiO2 [13, 14], and Ta2O5 [15, 16], etc. The reported good radiation immunity can be ascribed to the reversible filament-based switching mechanism of these RRAM devices. When an operation voltage is applied to the RRAM device, metal ions or oxygen ions/vacancies from the device electrodes or from the oxide material, according to the electrical field, drift in the film bulk to form or rupture the conducting filaments, leading the device transit

between the high and low resistance states reversibly [17–20]. Similarly, aluminum oxide (AlO x ), which is widely used in modern CMOS technology, also has an excellent filament-based RRAM performance [2, 3]. However, the radiation effects on AlO x RRAM MK-4827 cost are not implemented. In this work, the filament-based RRAM with the structure of Ag/AlO x /Pt was chosen as the experimental devices since it has the well-understood filament-based switching mechanism. 60Co γ ray treatment is used as the radiation source to investigate the total Amoxicillin ionizing dose (TID) effects on the devices. The switching behaviors and memory performances with different radiation

doses are compared and analyzed. Moreover, a radiation-induced hybrid filament model is proposed to explain the TID effects of γ ray treatment. Methods Ag/AlO x /Pt RRAM devices were fabricated for the radiation study. After a standard Radio Corporation of America (RCA) cleaning of the p-type silicon wafers, a 300-nm-thick silicon dioxide was thermally grown as an isolation layer. Then a 100-nm-thick Pt film was deposited by the e-beam evaporator as a bottom electrode (BE). Next, a 20-nm-thick AlO x film, as resistive switching layer, was deposited by the atomic layer deposition (ALD) at 220°C by using the precursors of trimethylaluminium (TMA) and H2O. After that, a 100-nm-thick Ag film was deposited and patterned by the shadow mask method to form the top electrode (TE). The schematic diagram of the Ag/AlO x /Pt RRAM devices is shown in Figure  1.