Materials And Other Needs For Advanced Phase Change Memory

Phase change memory (PCM), with its long history, may now hold its brightest promise to date. This bright future is being fueled by the push from big data. PCM is a non-volatile memory technology used to create solid-state random access memory devices that operate based the resistance properties of materials. Employing the electrical resistance differences-as opposed to differences in charge stored-between the amorphous and crystalline phases of the material, PCM can store bits, namely one’s and zero’s. Indeed, owing to the method of storage, PCM can in fact be designed to hold multiple bits thus leading to a high-density technology twice the storage density and less than half the cost of DRAM, the main kind found in typical personal computers. It has been long known that PCM can fill a need gap that spans 3 decades in performance from DRAM to solid state drive (NAND Flash). Furthermore, PCM devices can lead to performance and reliability improvements essential to enabling significant steps forward to supporting big data centric computing. This talk will focus on the science and challenges of aggressive scaling to realize the density needed, how this scaling challenge is intertwined with materials needs for endurance into the giga-cycles, and the associated forefront research aiming to realizing multi-level functionality into these nanoscale programmable resistor devices.