Material Engineering for Low Power Consumption and Multi-Level Storage in Lateral Phase-Change Memory

Abstract

The influence of the phase-change materials on the performance of memory devices for low power consumption and multi-level storage was investigated in this work. Doping N into chalcogenide phase-change materials resulted in higher resistivity and low-response to the temperature. The former characteristic leaded to high heating efficiency for phase change via self-heating and thus reduced the power consumption to about 1/20. The latter characteristic enabled easy control of phase change process in the memory device for multi-level storage. 16 distinct resistance levels were demonstrated in our lateral device by adopting a top heater structure