Status and Perspective of Chalcogenide PCM in the Semiconductor Industry

At the beginning of last decade, in early 2000, few disruptive technologies had been proposed to replace the standard Non-Volatile Memory technology in the semiconductor industry and to enlarge the memory application. As a fact any new technology takes long time to be accepted; after the concept demonstration and the technology validation it must enter into the production phase, demonstrating to be solid for manufacturing and strongly reliable for the product specification. Another key aspect of a new technology is the medium-long term scalability with the perspective to realize a memory cell and array that can be miniaturized following the leading edge roadmap. PCM technology is demonstrating the capability to enter the broad memory market and to be a mainstream memory thanks to a new set of features interesting for novel applications, combining components of NVM and DRAM and being at the same time a sustaining and a disruptive technology. Moreover there are intense efforts on the PCM technology development. On one side the industry is focused on the increase of the memory density through the scalability and the 3-dimensional integration. On the other side the chalcogenide material research may facilitate the scaling path and especially enlarge and open new application field. In this paper we will show the status of the Phase Change Memory (PCM) in the semiconductor industry and the perspectives of the most important research lines for the near future.

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