Current status of chalcogenide phase change memory

Atwood, G.; Bez, R.

doi:10.1109/drc.2005.1553042

Cited by 39 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Instead of representing information as the presence or absence of electrical charge, PCM encodes bits in different physical states of a chalcogenide material [2,3,4,10,14,18,20,23]. Through the application of different programming currents, the phase of the material can be melted and then re-solidified into either a crystalline or amorphous state, each with a distinct electrical resistance.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Use ECP, not ECC, for hard failures in resistive memories

Schechter

Loh

Strauß

et al. 2010

Proceedings of the 37th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture

282

211

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As leakage and other charge storage limitations begin to impair the scalability of DRAM, non-volatile resistive memories are being developed as a potential replacement. Unfortunately, current error-correction techniques are poorly suited to this emerging class of memory technologies. Unlike DRAM, PCM and other resistive memories have wear lifetimes, measured in writes, that are sufficiently short to make cell failures common during a system's lifetime. However, resistive memories are much less susceptible to transient faults than DRAM. The Hamming-based ECC codes used in DRAM are designed to handle transient faults with no effective lifetime limits, but ECC codes applied to resistive memories would wear out faster than the cells they are designed to repair. This paper proposes Error-Correcting Pointers (ECP), a new approach to error correction optimized for memories in which errors are the result of permanent cell failures that occur, and are immediately detectable, at write time. ECP corrects errors by permanently encoding the locations of failed cells into a table and assigning cells to replace them. ECP provides longer lifetimes than previously proposed solutions with equivalent overhead. Furthermore, as the variance in cell lifetimes increases -a likely consequence of further process scaling -ECP's margin of improvement over existing schemes also increases.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Use ECP, not ECC, for hard failures in resistive memories

Schechter

Loh

Strauß

et al. 2010

Proceedings of the 37th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture

282

211

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This large resistance window permits a reliable read operation. PCM technology guarantees scalability, long cycling endurance, long-term data retention, CMOS compatibility, single-bit programming granularity, low voltage and low power [2].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…the single memory device, reliability was extensively discussed [2,4,5], the statistical reliability in terms of programming window [1], data-retention [6] and endurance at array level is still an open issue. The programming window must allow the separation of the reset and set distributions for 1 GB array [7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Phase change memory is a non-volatile memory device, where the binary information is associated with the different electrical resistances of the crystalline and amorphous phase of a chalcogenide material, in this work Ge 2 Sb 2 Te 5 (GST) [2,3]. The programming operation (reset) refers to the crystalline-amorphous transition through melting (620°C) and rapid cooling (quenching), in order to avoid spontaneous crystallization, while erasing (set) refers to amorphous-crystalline transition through annealing below the melting and above the glass temperature.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Explanation of programming distributions in phase-change memory arrays based on crystallization time statistics

Mantegazza

Ielmini

Pirovano

et al. 2008

Solid-State Electronics

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“…Although several studies allowed a deep insight of the electrical behavior of these cells [1], details of the physical principles underlying such devices still require further investigations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%