Practical Demonstration of a Memristive Fuse

Abstract: Since its inception the memristive fuse has been a good example of how small numbers of memristors can be combined to obtain useful behaviours unachievable by individual devices. In this work, we link the memristive fuse concept with that of the Complementary Resistive Switch (CRS), exploit that link to experimentally demonstrate a practical memristive fuse using TiOx-based ReRAM cells and explain its basic operational principles. The fuse is stimulated by trains of identical pulses where successive pulse trains feature opposite polarities. In response, we observe a gradual (analogue) drop in resistive state followed by a gradual recovery phase regardless of input stimulus polarity; echoing traditional, binary CRS behaviour. This analogue switching property opens the possibility of operating the memristive fuse as a single-component step change detector. Moreover, we discover that the characteristics of the individual memristors used to demonstrate the memristive fuse concept in this work allow our fuse to be operated in a regime where one of the two constituent devices can be switched largely independently from the other. This property, not present in the traditional CRS, indicates that the inherently analogue memristive fuse architecture may support additional operational flexibility through e.g. allowing finer control over its resistive state.