Investigation of a selective switching device using a phase-change material for a 3-dimensional PCRAM array

A selective switching device utilizing a phase-change material was investigated. In this work, we present a new concept to realize serially a selective switching and memory operation in a multiple phase-change memory with only phase-change materials without any semiconductor switching device. A phase-change material for selective switching can be expected to have a higher resistance amorphous phase and to show lower melting and crystallization temperatures than a phase-change material for a memory. Here, we present a structural method to obtain the above requirements. In addition, we confirm the switching operation by a selective current pulse for multiple phase-change materials from the experiment. From these results, we expected that one of the multiple phasechange materials can be replaced in a switching device without the need for an additional selective device, and that such a device would be feasible for 3-dimensional PCM architecture.