Abstract
Conductance quantization (QC) phenomena occurring in metal oxide based memristors demonstrate great potential for high-density data storage through multilevel switching, and analog synaptic weight update for effective training of the artificial neural networks. Continuous, linear and symmetrical modulation of the device conductance is a critical issue in QC behavior of memristors. In this contribution, we employ the scanning probe microscope (SPM) assisted electrode engineering strategy to control the ion migration process to construct single conductive filaments in Pt/HfO(x)/Pt devices. Upon deliberate tuning and evolution of the filament, 32 half integer quantized conductance states in the 16 G(0) to 0.5 G(0) range with enhanced distribution uniformity was achieved. Simulation results revealed that the numbers of the available QC states and fluctuation of the conductance at each state play an important role in determining the overall performance of the neural networks. The 32-state QC behavior of the hafnium oxide device shows improved recognition accuracy approaching 90% for handwritten digits, based on analog type operation of the multilayer perception (MLP) neural network.