Hysteresis Resonance and Multi-Pinched Hysteresis Loops in Cu/Cu:ZnO/Cu Resistive Switching Devices

At present, great attention is being devoted towards resistive switching devices owing to lower switching voltage (<3 V), higher tolerance (> 10∧6 cycles), higher scalability (< 10 nm), multi-bit operations, and higher information storage time (10 years) compared to the existing broadly employed transistor technology. This was all possible owing to the accidental discovery of memristance by Hewlett Packard (HP) labs in 2008. In the past few decades, discoveries of such unique electronic properties have led to tremendous technological advancements. Consequently, it is very important to continually seek newer electronic characteristics. In this work, copper (Cu)-doped zinc oxide (ZnO) thin film was synthesized on Cu electrodes to form a Cu/Cu: ZnO/Cu resistive switching device. Function generator and oscilloscope were employed to obtain the electronic characteristics of the device instead of conventional techniques, which resulted in a 96.17% improvement in total equipment expenses. Most importantly, the proposed device exhibited hysteresis resonance and multi-pinched hysteresis; such phenomena have never been reported to date. These characteristics are extremely essential towards futuristic electronics for the development of computational circuits with meliorated performance, electronic systems with improved controllability, memory cells with higher data storage, and in-memory-based processing capabilities.