A GeSbTe phase-change memory cell featuring a tungsten heater electrode for low-power, highly stable, and short-read-cycle operations

Author

Takaura, N. ; Terao, M. ; Kurotsuchi, K. ; Yamauchi, T. ; Tonomura, O. ; Hanaoka, Y. ; Takemura, R. ; Osada, K. ; Kawahara, T. ; Matsuoka, H.

Author_Institution

Central Res. Lab., Hitachi, Ltd., Tokyo, Japan

fYear

2003

fDate

8-10 Dec. 2003

Abstract

This paper presents a GeSbTe memory cell with a tungsten heater electrode. The cell has the lowest reset current (50 /spl mu/A) ever reported for a phase-change memory device. The factors responsible for re-amorphization, which increased the instability of crystallization are shown. The GeSbTe cell in this work offers a read-time within 2 nsec, which allows 200 MHz-chip operation with negligible effects of read disturbance.

Keywords

amorphisation; germanium compounds; low-power electronics; order-disorder transformations; random-access storage; semiconductor materials; tungsten; 2 ns; 200 MHz; 50 muA; GeSbTe-W; crystallization instability; low-power operations; nonvolatile memory; phase-change memory cell; re-amorphization; read disturbance; read-time; reset current; short-read-cycle operations; tungsten heater electrode; Crystallization; Electrodes; Energy consumption; Laboratories; Nonvolatile memory; Phase change memory; Switches; Tungsten; Ultra large scale integration; Voltage;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Electron Devices Meeting, 2003. IEDM '03 Technical Digest. IEEE International

Conference_Location

Washington, DC, USA

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7872-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IEDM.2003.1269423

Filename

1269423