Phase change memory technology

By Geoffrey W. Burr, Matthew J. Breitwisch, Michele M. Franceschini, D. Garetto, Kailash Gopalakrishnan, B. Jackson, Bülent N. Kurdi, Chung Hon Lam, Luis A. Lastras, A. Padilla and 3 more. 2010

1,007 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The authors survey the current state of phase change memory (PCM), a nonvolatile solid-state memory technology built around the large electrical contrast between the highly resistive amorphous and highly conductive crystalline states in so-called phase change materials. PCM technology has made rapid progress in a short time, having passed older technologies in terms of both sophisticated demonstrations of scaling to small device dimensions, as well as integrated large-array demonstrators with impressive retention, endurance, performance, and yield characteristics. They introduce the physics behind PCM technology, assess how its characteristics match up with various potential applications across the memory-storage hierarchy, and discuss its strengths including scalability and rapid switching speed. Challenges for the technology are addressed, including the design of PCM cells for low reset current, the need to control device-to-device variability, and undesirable changes in the phase change material that c...

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b05d0358b665be6af1f8074d9f9b9882c72c253d

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Citations in the corpus

Interfacial phase-change memory. (2011, methodology): “A laser static tester system [5, 6] was used to measure the SET and RESET times of the GST and IPCM films.”
Miniature Multilevel Optical Memristive Switch Using Phase Change Material (2019, background): “Since a hundred thousand times of rewriting has been achieved with phase-change materials, the number of switching cycles in our device can be further improved [28].”
Recently emerging trends in thermal conductivity of polymer nanocomposites (2016, background): “The influence of nanoscale heat transfer extends to both practical and groundbreaking enhancements in the design of PCM devices (Burr et al. 2010).”
Evidence and solution of over-RESET problem for HfOX based resistive memory with sub-ns switching speed and high endurance (2010, background): “The benefit of sub ns switching speed of the HfOx resistive memory device not only effectively shortens the writing operation time due to tedious write verifying, but also provides the feasibility of replacing DRAM [5].”
In-Memory Big Data Management and Processing: A Survey (2015, neutral): “Advanced NVRAM technologies, such as phase change memory [199], Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic RAM (STTMRAM) [200], and Memristors [201], can provide orders of magnitude better performance than either conventional”
Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM): an Overview of Materials, Switching Mechanism, Performance, Multilevel Cell (mlc) Storage, Modeling, and Applications (2020, background): “For example, in copper/poly(3-hexylthiophene): [6,6]-phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester/indium-tin oxide (Cu/P3HT: PCBM/ITO) structure, a stable resistive switching behavior was observed; however, it disappeared after the Cu electrode was replaced with Pt electrode [60].”
FPTree: A Hybrid SCM-DRAM Persistent and Concurrent B-Tree for Storage Class Memory (2016, methodology): “These technologies are grouped under the umbrella term of Storage Class Memory ( SCM ) and include Phase Change Memory [6], Memristors [29], and Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic Random Access Memory [4].”
A review of emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies and applications (2016, background): “PCM is based on reversible transition between crystalline phase (low resistance) and amorphous phase (high resistance) of chalco-genides [13].”