Thermal conductivity measurements and modeling of phase-change GST materials

Phase-change technology has been widely used in rewritable disks for optical recording applications. Recently, it has also received attention as a candidate for future high storage density non-volatile random access memory, due to its much longer cycle life (similar to 10(13)) and fast data access time (similar to 100ns) compared with the existing Flash memory technology. In this paper, we present thermal conductivity data and models for phase-change GeSbTe material that would be helpful in performance optimization and improvement in the reliability (i.e., enhancement of data rate, cyclability, control of mark-edge jitter) of phase-change-based data storage devices and systems. We perform the thermal characterization of Ge4Sb1Te5 and Ge2Sb2Te5 phase-change materials for the application of optical recording and phase-change memory cell using the techniques of thermoreflectance and electrical resistance thermometry. The limits of lattice and electronic thermal conductivities are investigated to determine their relative contributions as a function of tellurium concentration at different crystalline structures.