High temperature reliability of μtrench Phase-Change Memory devices

In this paper, we investigate the reliability of μtrench Phase-Change Memory (PCM) devices at high operating temperature (up to 180 °C). We show that the high temperature strongly impacts the programming curves, by linearly decreasing the threshold voltage and decreasing the RESET current. Furthermore, the cyclability of the cell significantly increases up to more than 109 cycles. The decreasing of the threshold voltage at high operating temperatures, reduces the thermal stress in the cell during the SET operations. The increased lifetime of the cell at high operating temperatures is explained by means of physical simulations.