Phase-change properties of GeSbTe thin films deposited by plasma-enchanced atomic layer depositon

Sannian Song; Dongning Yao; Zhitang Song; Lina Gao; Zhonghua Zhang; Le Li; Lanlan Shen; Liangcai Wu; Bo Liu; Yan Cheng; Songlin Feng

doi:10.1186/s11671-015-0815-5

Phase-change properties of GeSbTe thin films deposited by plasma-enchanced atomic layer depositon

Nanoscale Res Lett. 2015 Feb 28:10:89. doi: 10.1186/s11671-015-0815-5. eCollection 2015.

Authors

Sannian Song¹, Dongning Yao¹, Zhitang Song¹, Lina Gao², Zhonghua Zhang¹, Le Li¹, Lanlan Shen¹, Liangcai Wu¹, Bo Liu¹, Yan Cheng¹, Songlin Feng¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Functional Materials for Informatics, Shanghai Institute of Micro-system and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 200050 China.
² Division of Nuclear Materials Science and Engineering, Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 201800 China.

Abstract

Phase-change access memory (PCM) appears to be the strongest candidate for next-generation high-density nonvolatile memory. The fabrication of ultrahigh-density PCM depends heavily on the thin-film growth technique for the phase-changing chalcogenide material. In this study, Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) and GeSb8Te thin films were deposited by plasma-enhanced atomic layer deposition (ALD) method using Ge [(CH3)2 N]4, Sb [(CH3)2 N]3, Te(C4H9)2 as precursors and plasma-activated H2 gas as reducing agent of the metallorganic precursors. Compared with GST-based device, GeSb8Te-based device exhibits a faster switching speed and reduced reset voltage, which is attributed to the growth-dominated crystallization mechanism of the Sb-rich GeSb8Te films. These results show that ALD is an attractive method for preparation of phase-change materials.

Keywords: Atomic layer deposition; Electric properties; Microstructure; Phase-change memory.