Chalcogenide alloys as a basis for new non-volatile random access memories

In the past decades chalcogenide alloys have been successfully employed for rewritable optical data storage. Beside the optical contrast upon phase change from the amorphous to the crystalline state utilized in optical data storage devices, chalcogenide alloys show an even more pronounced change in their electronic properties, namely their resistivity(1). This resistivity change is the basis of a new purely electronic memory device the so-called phase change random access memory (PCRAM). We present the electrical properties of one candidate material, namely Ge2Sb2Te5, and also demonstrate in a first experiment the switching operation of a single cell.