Phase change memories: State-of-the-art, challenges and perspectives

Among the emerging non-volatile technologies, phase change memories (PCM) are the most attractive in terms of both performance and scalability perspectives. The paper reviews the physics underlying PCM operation, the scaling potentials of these devices and some options recently proposed for the cell structure. The paper also addresses the main challenges for the PCM to become fully competitive with standard Flash technology. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.