Electrical Behavior of Phase-Change Memory Cells Based on GeTe

Abstract

In this letter, we present a study on the electrical behavior of phase-change memories (PCMs) based on a GeTe active material. GeTe PCMs show, first, extremely rapid SET operation (yielding a gain of more than one decade in energy per bit with respect to standard GST PCMs), second, robust cycling, up to 1 × 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">5</sup> , with 30-ns SET and RESET stress time, and third, a better retention behavior at high temperature with respect to GST PCMs. These results, obtained on single cells, suggest GeTe as a promising alternative material to standard GST to improve PCM performance and reliability.