Three-Dimensional Simulation of Proposed Ring-Confined-Chalcogenide Phase-Change Memory for Reducing Reset Operation Current

摘要

In this paper, we proposed a phase-change memory (PCM) structure which has a ring confined chalcogenide (RCC) for reducing reset operation current. The temperature distributions of normal bottom contact (NBC), confined chalcogenide (CC) and proposed RCC PCMs were simulated by 3 dimensional finite element method. It was very clear that a much higher temperature can be obtained for RCC than NBC cell at a certain programming current. The programming characteristics also exhibited that the operation current of RCC cell can be as low as about 45% of NBC cell while that of CC cell was about 82% of CC cell.