Radiofrequency sputter deposition of germanium-selenide thin films for resistive switching

The superionic conducting properties of Ag-doped GeSe thin films make this material a promising candidate for future, resistively switching-based memories allowing for high integration densities and short switching times. This paper reports on the radiofrequency sputter deposition of GeSe thin films and on the properties of the deposited thin films with respect to non-volatile memory applications. As sputter deposition is a widely used deposition method for industrial applications, we focused on the influences of deposition parameters as power and pressure to examine the suitability of sputter deposition for fabricating random access memories using GeSe-based resistive memory cells. Multiple characterization methods were utilized to determine the quality of the deposited thin films. The results of our measurements showed that we obtained smooth, dense and amorphous layers, which reveal good switching properties after doping with Ag, suitable for the use in GeSe-based memories.