Medium-Temperature-Oxidized GeO Resistive-Switching Random-Access Memory and Its Applicability in Processing-in-Memory Computing

Processing-in-memory (PIM) is emerging as a new computing paradigm to replace the existing von Neumann computer architecture for data-intensive processing. For the higher end-user mobility, low-power operation capability is more increasingly required and components need to be renovated to make a way out of the conventional software-driven artificial intelligence. In this work, we investigate the hardware performances of PIM architecture that can be presumably constructed by resistive-switching random-access memory (ReRAM) synapse fabricated with a relatively larger thermal budget in the full Si processing compatibility. By introducing a medium-temperature oxidation (MTO) in which the sputtered Ge atoms are oxidized at a relatively higher temperature compared with the ReRAM devices fabricated by physical vapor deposition (PVD) at room temperature, higher device reliability has been acquired. Based on the empirically obtained device parameters, a PIM architecture has been conceived and a system-level evaluations have been performed in this work. Considerations include the cycle-to-cycle variation in the GeO x ReRAM synapse, analog-to-digital converter (ADC) resolution, synaptic array size, and interconnect latency for the system-level evaluation with the Canadian Institute for Advance Research (CIFAR)-10 dataset. A fully Si processing compatible and robust ReRAM synapse and its applicability for PIM are demonstrated.