Toward large-scale access-transistor-free memristive crossbars

Abstract — Memristive crossbars have been shown to be excel-lent candidates for building an ultra-dense memory system be-cause a per-cell access-transistor may no longer be necessary. However, the elimination of the access-transistor introduces sev-eral parasitic effects due to the existence of partially-selected de-vices during memory accesses, which could limit the scalability of access-transistor-free (ATF) memristive crossbars. In this paper we discuss these challenges in detail and describe some solutions addressing these challenges at multiple levels of design abstrac-tion. I