R&D: Amorphous Phase-change Memory Alloy with no Resistance Drift

Nature Materials has published an article written by Xiaozhe Wang, Center for Alloy Innovation and Design (CAID), State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China, Ruobing Wang, National Key Laboratory of Materials for Integrated Circuits, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China, Suyang Sun, Ding Xu, Chao Nie, Zhou Zhou, Chenyu Wen, Junying Zhang, Ruixuan Chu, Xueyang Shen, Wen Zhou, Center for Alloy Innovation and Design (CAID), State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China, Zhitang Song, National Key Laboratory of Materials for Integrated Circuits, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China, Jiang-Jing Wang, En Ma, and Wei Zhang, Center for Alloy Innovation and Design (CAID), State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China.

Abstract: “Spontaneous structural relaxation is intrinsic to glassy materials due to their metastable nature. For phase-change materials, the resultant temporal change in electrical resistance seriously hampers neuromorphic computing applications. Here we report an ab-initio-calculation-informed design of amorphous phase-change materials composed of robust ‘molecule-like’ motifs, depriving the amorphous alloy of critical structural ingredients responsible for relaxation and, hence, resistance drift. We demonstrate amorphous CrTe₃ thin films that display practically no resistance drift at any working temperature from −200 °C to 165 °C, and highlight the multilevel encoding ability via a hybrid opto-electronic approach. We further reveal that the same no-drift behaviour holds for melt-quenched amorphous CrTe₃ in electronic devices. Moreover, the application potential of CrTe₃ is testified by its incorporation in a vehicle with an automatic path-tracking function. Our work provides an alternative route to achieve requisite properties for potential phase-change neuromorphic computing via the judicious design of disordered phase-change materials.“