Excellent thermal stability attributed to Cr dopant in Sb2Te phase change material

Abstract

Herein, Cr was selected as the dopant to improve the performance of Sb2Te in phase change random access memory (PCRAM). The thermal properties, crystal structure and chemical bonding state of the as-prepared Cr0.39Sb2Te (CST) were investigated. The CST containing 11.5At% Cr-dopant exhibited excellent performances including high crystallization temperature (218.6℃), good data retention (10 years @136.5 ± 1.0℃) and high stability with low-density change rate (2.8%). The switching speed up to 10 ns and the endurance nearly 1 × 105 cycles were obtained for the CST based PCRAM cells. All these findings indicated that the CST material is a potential candidate for universal memory devices.