AlSc Alloy Doped Sb 2 Te as High Speed Phase-Change Material with Excellent Thermal Stability and Ultralow Density Change

• Published in: ECS journal of solid state science and technology Vol. 10; no. 1; p. 14006
• Main Authors: Liang, Qi, Zhao, Junshi, Liu, Wanliang, Song, Zhitang, Song, Sannian, Wu, Liangcai
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.01.2021
• ISSN: 2162-8769; 2162-8777
• DOI: 10.1149/2162-8777/abdc43

The research progress of global nonvolatile phase change memory (PCM) is quite effective. Among them, chalcogenide Sb 2 Te is considered as one of the important materials with high operation speed. In this work, we put forward a 1:1 AlSc alloy doped AlSc-Sb 2 Te to enhance the performance of Sb 2 Te, including thermal stability, density change and transition speed. Experimental results show that AlSc-Sb 2 Te has better 10-year data retention temperature (146 °C) and higher crystallization temperature (221 °C), which reflects excellent amorphous thermal stability of AlSc-Sb 2 Te. X-ray reflection analysis shows that this material has much smaller density change (2.6%) than that of reported phase change materials. Importantly, the AlSc-Sb 2 Te based device has a very low power consumption of 6.78 × 10 −12 J and a high operation speed of 6 ns.