Sb-rich CuSbTe material: A candidate for high-speed and high-density phase change memory application

Abstract

Sb-rich CuSbTe material is proposed to meet the requirements of low-power consumption and high-speed of phase change memory application. Sb-rich CuSbTe material is based on Sb-rich SbTe (Sb3Te) material which has a fast crystallization speed. The poor amorphous thermal stability of Sb3Te material can be solved by the addition of Cu. Cu0.25Sb3Te-based device is expected to achieve fast access speed (6 ns) and maintain a high data retention (10-year: 85 °C) in comparison with that of Ge2Sb2Te5 (10-year: 78 °C). With the doping of Cu, the power consumption and the grain size of Sb3Te-based device are greatly reduced. Under the pulse width of 6 ns, the RESET voltage is only 4.1 V. Moreover, the operation cycles is close to 1 × 105, and the resistance ratio is nearly two orders of magnitude. Finally, the XRD, TEM and XRR measurements were carried out to obtain the microscopic analysis for Cu0.25Sb3Te alloy.