Investigation of changes in band gap and density of localized states
on phase transition for Ge
2
Sb
2
Te
5
and Si
3.5
Sb
2
Te
3
materials
Feng Rao
⇑
, Zhitang Song, Yan Cheng, Mengjiao Xia, Kun Ren, Liangcai Wu, Bo Liu,
Songlin Feng
State Key Laboratory of Functional Materials for Informatics, Shanghai Institute of Micro-System and Information Technology,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200050, People’s Republic of China
Received 10 March 2011; received in revised form 8 September 2011; accepted 8 September 2011
Abstract
Upon phase transition, the resistivity changes of Ge
2
Sb
2
Te
5
(GST) and Si
3.5
Sb
2
Te
3
(SST) are proved to be closely related to the vari-
ations of band gap and density of localized states. Amorphous SST has a slightly more localized state than amorphous GST; however,
the larger band gap of SST material causes relatively difficult phase transition processes. Therefore, the phase change memory (PCM) cell
based on the SST film shows larger threshold voltages for both set and reset operations than that of the GST-based PCM cell. The for-
mation of amorphous Si-rich segregated areas in the SST film during phase transitions increases the randomness of the whole film micro-
structure, which leads to a different Urbach tail absorption result to that of the GST film.
Ó 2011 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Phase change; Band gap; Density of localized states
1. Introduction
Phase change memory (PCM) has been internationally
recognized as the next generation non-volatile memory. It
is able to achieve low power consumption, high storage
density and high operating speed by scaling down the cell
dimension to the 10 nm level with a 10 ns storage time
[1,2]. The usual phase change mate rials utilized in PCM
are chalcogenide alloy s. These chalcogenide alloys, espe-
cially the Te-based ones, e.g. Ge
2
Sb
2
Te
5
(GST) and
Si
3.5
Sb
2
Te
3
(SST) [3,4], show a pronounced change in elec-
trical properties accompanied by reversible structure
change between amorphous (high resistivity state/reset
state) and crystalline (low resistivity state/set state) phases.
To reset data, electrical pulses of high magni tude an d short
duration are applied to the phase change film in PCM to
melt a local active region via Joule heating. The fast
cooling speed (>10
9
Ks
1
) quenches the melting area into
an amorphous phase. Correspondingly, to set data,
electrical pulses of lower magnitude and longer period
can heat the amorphous region above its cryst allization
temperature.
This electrically induced structural change in chalcogen-
ide materials has been named Ovonic memory switching
(OMS) [5,6]. It should be noted that OMS usuall y occurs
after another electrically driven switching effect – Ovonic
threshold switching (OTS) [5,6]. OTS also corresponds to a
reversible change between low and high conductive states,
but there is no obvious change in microstructure of the mate-
rial. Once the phase transition temperature is reached after
OTS, the amorphous chalcogenide material can be changed
into a stable crystalline phase with high conductivity. To
explain the OTS mechanism, Adler et al. [7] argued that
the OTS effect is supposed to be a pure electronic phenome-
non without any thermal breakdown. The proposed elec-
tronic phenomeno n describes a balance between a strong
Shockley Hall Reed recombination through trap levels and
1359-6454/$36.00 Ó 2011 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.actamat.2011.09.015
⇑
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: fengrao@mail.sim.ac.cn (F. Rao).
www.elsevier.com/locate/actamat
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Acta Materialia 60 (2012) 323–328