On the resistive switching mechanism of parylene-based memristive devices

Parylene is a widely used polymer possessing such advantages as low cost and safety for the human body. Recently, several studies have been conducted showing that parylene can be used as a dielectric layer of memristors - new circuit design elements that are promising for the implementation of hardware neural networks. However, the mechanism of resistive switching of parylene-based memristors remains unclear. In this paper, we report the result of a comprehensive study of this mechanism for Metal/Parylene/ITO sandwich memristive devices. The obtained results clearly show that the origin of resistive switching in the devices is the formation of conductive metal bridges (filaments) from the top electrode (Cu, Ag or Al) to the bottom one (ITO). And furthermore, conductance quantization effect with both integer and half-integer multiples of the quantum of conductance G(0) = 2e(2)/h has been observed in the samples, which also confirms the chosen switching model, and can be useful in the development of multilevel data memory cells.