Yesterday, semiconductor materials manufacturing specialist ATMI and Ovonics, the company that’s long been associated with amorphous semiconductor research, jointly announced yet another advance in PCM (phase change memory) materials science. The two companies have been experimenting with chemical-vapor deposition (CVD) of GST (germanium antimony telluride) thin films used for creating PCM elements rather than sputtering. Thin-film deposited GST exhibits several improved qualities over the sputtered material including sub-50nsec write times, typical write endurance of 10^8 to 10^10 cycles, and data retention that exceeds 10 years at 100°C. Both write endurance and data retention at small geometries are proving to be difficult problems for PCM commercialization and these new research findings are no doubt of interest to semiconductor vendors interested in getting commercial PCM devices to market after more than 40 years of research.

Results of this joint research will be published as a peer-reviewed technical paper highlighting the electrical performance of the CVD thin film in the September issue of Electron Device Letters. ATMI will also be presenting a paper focusing on the CVD process at the European\Phase Change and Ovonics Symposium (E/PCOS), which is being held in Milano, Italy on September 7.