  Passive crossbar arrays based upon memristive devices, at crosspoints, hold
great promise for the future high-density and non-volatile memories. The most
significant challenge facing memristive device based crossbars today is the
problem of sneak-path currents. In this paper, we investigate a memristive
device with intrinsic rectification behavior to suppress the sneak-path
currents in crossbar arrays. The device model is implemented in Verilog-A
language and is simulated to match device characteristics readily available in
the literature. Then, we systematically evaluate the read operation performance
of large-scale crossbar arrays utilizing our proposed model in terms of read
margin and power consumption while considering different crossbar sizes,
interconnect resistance values, HRS/LRS (High Resistance State/Low Resistance
State) values, rectification ratios and different read-schemes. The outcomes of
this study are understanding the trade-offs among read margin, power
consumption, read-schemes and most importantly providing a guideline for
circuit designers to improve the performance of a memory based crossbar
structure. In addition, read operation performance comparison of the intrinsic
rectifying memristive device model with other memristive device models are
studied.
