OTS Physics-based Screening for Environment-friendly Selector Materials

Abstract

Restricted use of toxic elements is being explored extensively in the semiconductor industry for sustainable developments. In response to this trend, we performed systematic, and fully ab-initio screening for new ovonic threshold switching (OTS) ternary materials, excluding toxic elements such as As and Se. To narrow down the large amount of possible chemical compositions to the most promising candidates, we used OTS physics-based material parameters like material stability, electronic properties, or change in polarizability (OTS gauge). The OTS gauge concept is introduced as a condensed matter physics parameter to estimate the probability of a material to show an OTS behavior. As a result, we found 11 promising ternary compositions of As/Se-free OTS selector materials for RRAM applications.