About cookies on this site Our websites require some cookies to function properly (required). In addition, other cookies may be used with your consent to analyze site usage, improve the user experience and for advertising. For more information, please review your options. By visiting our website, you agree to our processing of information as described in IBM’sprivacy statement. To provide a smooth navigation, your cookie preferences will be shared across the IBM web domains listed here.
Publication
New Journal of Physics
Paper
Subthreshold electrical transport in amorphous phase-change materials
Abstract
Chalcogenide-based phase-change materials play a prominent role in information technology. In spite of decades of research, the details of electrical transport in these materials are still debated. In this article, we present a unified model based on multiple-trapping transport together with 3D Poole-Frenkel emission from a two-center Coulomb potential. With this model, we are able to explain electrical transport both in as-deposited phase-change material thin films, similar to experimental conditions in early work dating back to the 1970s, and in melt-quenched phase-change materials in nanometer-scale phase-change memory devices typically used in recent studies. Experimental measurements on two widely different device platforms show remarkable agreement with the proposed mechanism over a wide range of temperatures and electric fields. In addition, the proposed model is able to seamlessly capture the temporal evolution of the transport properties of the melt-quenched phase upon structural relaxation.