Emerging memories

What kind of material is GST, the typical recording material for phase-change memory?

  1. AAn alloy of gallium, silicon and titanium
  2. BAn alloy of gold, silver and tin
  3. CA compound of germanium, antimony and tellurium (such as Ge2Sb2Te5)
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Answer: C. A compound of germanium, antimony and tellurium (such as Ge2Sb2Te5)

GST is a chalcogenide material made of germanium (Ge), antimony (Sb) and tellurium (Te), with Ge2Sb2Te5 as a typical composition. It switches quickly between crystalline and amorphous states, which differ greatly in resistance and optical reflectivity, so it has been used in rewritable optical discs and PCM.

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More Emerging memories questions

  1. Which is an example of a material researched and used as the switching layer of ReRAM?
  2. Which correctly describes how using non-volatile memory for caches and registers is expected to save system power?
  3. Which is a typical application in which FeRAM has been used?
  4. In which process of a logic LSI is the MRAM storage element (MTJ) generally built?
  5. Which phenomenon becomes a problem when phase-change memory is scaled, in which heat from writing reaches a neighboring cell and changes its state?