Memory switching of germanium tellurium amorphous semiconductor

Investigation of DC conductivity and switching phenomenon of Se80Te20−xGex amorphous system

“…9 as an example. It is observed thatP th increases with temperature in the investigated range, which agrees with results obtained before for other amorphous semiconductor materials [16,19]. This can be explained by the following equations:…”

“…The obtained values, given in Table 5 are in good agreement with those obtained for other amorphous semiconductor films [8,15,19,22,23]. Moreover, the agreement of the obtained values of the ratioε/E σ2 given in Table 4 with those values obtained earlier and derived theoretically [9] for the breakdown process, it can be concluded that the observed memory type switching can be interpreted on the basis of an electrothermal breakdown process.…”

“…The obtained values of this ratio are given in Table 4. It is found that the mean value of the ratioε V th /E σ2 ≈ 0.5, agrees with that obtained theoretically on the basis of the electrothermal model for the switching process [8,9] and those obtained before for other semiconducting compositions [15,[17][18][19].…”

“…It is clear thatF th decreases with temperature in the investigated range. It was suggested [19] that at the threshold voltage point, the force extracted from the applied field is equal to the restoring force due to the viscosity of the investigated samples. Therefore, in order to keep the electric field constant at the switching point at certain temperature the sample undergoes switching to the ON-state.…”

A contribution to the phase diagram of the system Ge–Sn–Te and the conditions of (Sn,Ge)Te crystal growth

“…Their modern application -as well as for the other chalcogenide materials such as SbTe and GeSbTe -lies in the field of optical and electrical storage devices due to reversible crystalline-amorphous phase transitions. It has been proposed to use thin amorphous GeTe films [1] and stacked GeTe/SnTe layers [2] for the production of nonvolatile phase-change random access memory (PRAM) devices [3]. For application in the IR optoelectronics, the growth of high-quality crystals with a uniform composition is of great importance.…”