Uniform silicon carbide doped Sb2Te nanomaterial for high temperature and high speed PCM applications

• The oxidation of Sb and Te elements can be avoided.
• The thermal stability of Sb2Te is improved obviously through SiC doping.
• XRD and TEM show the Sb2Te-SiC nanomaterial is very uniform and no phase separation occurred.
• SET/RESET operation of 7 ns is realized with large sensing margin.

Sb–Te alloy is widely considered as one of the important materials for phase change memory (PCM) with fast operation speed. However, the poor amorphous phase stability limits its wide application. In this work, silicon carbide (SiC) doped Sb2Te (Sb2Te-SiC) nanomaterial was proposed to improve the thermal stability of Sb2Te. It was found that the crystallization temperature of Sb2Te was remarkably improved from 149 °C to 251 °C. Accordingly, the temperature for 10-year data retention increases from 56.5 °C to 156.4 °C. X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscope results indicate that the grain size of Sb2Te-SiC film was largely reduced with SiC doping. Besides, experimental results show the Sb2Te-SiC nanomaterial is very uniform and no phase separation was observed even after 300 °C annealing. Furthermore, the Sb2Te-SiC nanomaterial based PCM cells show fast operation speed of 7 ns and good endurance ability of 2.1 × 104 cycles.