What is PCM (phase-change memory)?
Nonvolatile memory that stores information by the difference between the crystalline (low-resistance) and amorphous (high-resistance) states of a chalcogenide material.
Field: Emerging memories
PCM (phase-change memory) in the explanations
PCM heats chalcogenide materials such as GeSbTe with Joule heating from current and quenches them, switching between a low-resistance crystalline state and a high-resistance amorphous state.
Which correctly describes how phase-change memory (PCM) sto…The large reset current is PCM's power challenge, reduced by structures that shrink the heated volume.
In phase-change memory (PCM), how is a cell put into the hi…The amorphous phase of PCM slowly relaxes structurally, so its resistance creeps upward roughly as a power of time (R ∝ t^ν, with ν around 0.1)—resistance drift.
In phase-change memory (PCM), what is the phenomenon in whi…
Questions that mention PCM (phase-change memory) (11)
- Which correctly describes how phase-change memory (PCM) stores data?
- In phase-change memory (PCM), how is a cell put into the high-resistance amorphous state (reset)?
- In phase-change memory (PCM), what is the phenomenon in which the resistance of the amorphous state gradually increases over time?
- What kind of material is GST, the typical recording material for phase-change memory?
- Which phenomenon becomes a problem when phase-change memory is scaled, in which heat from writing reaches a neighboring cell and changes its state?
- In phase-change memory (PCM), how is a cell heated to put it into the low-resistance crystalline state (set)?
- In phase-change memory (PCM), how can multiple bits be stored in one cell (multi-level storage)?
- In cross-point memories such as PCM, which chalcogenide device, placed in series with the storage element as a selector, suddenly conducts above a certain voltage?
- Which correctly describes how MRAM stores data?
- In general, which memory has the fewest possible rewrite cycles?
- Which correctly describes the idea of "universal memory" that many emerging memory efforts have aimed for?
Related terms
Chalcogenide MRAM Threshold voltage Magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) ReRAM (resistive RAM) FeRAM (ferroelectric RAM) 3D XPoint Cross-point memory Electroforming FeFET (ferroelectric FET)