Finite Element Analysis of GeTe / Ge2Sb2Te5 Interfacial Phase Change Memory Devices.

High switching current and energy are major challenges yet to be overcome effectively in phase change memory for large scale industry-level production. Superlattice based interfacial phase change memory (iPCM) has shown great potential in recent years to provide reduced current density operation. In this work, we perform finite element method based computational study on GeTe/Ge 2 Sb 2 Te 5 iPCM pillar cell and analyze the device performance for different material and structural parameters. The simulation results predict ~12.5% reduction in RESET energy in iPCM compared to the conventional PCM. We obtain ~4.6x decrease in RESET current when the device is scaled down from 50 nm to 10 nm. Increase in the number of periods of the superlattice results in less RESET current required, which can be attributed to the better thermal confinement due to additional thermal boundary resistances at the increased number of interfaces.