Transitions Between Amorphous and Crystalline States Using Electrical Pulse in Tellurium-Based Semiconductor

Abstract

The phase transitions between amorphous and crystalline states by applying electrical pulses in tellurium-based semiconductor at room temperature has been studied in this paper. The memory device was fabricated by a semiconductor thin film of composition GelO Te90 sandwiched between two metal electrodes. Binary states ‘0’ and ‘1’ may be assigned to the high resistive amorphous state and the low resistive crystalline state, respectively. High-speed write and erase operations in the memory device were induced by applying short and long electrical pulses. It was found that for the given write and erase conditions, about 3500 write-erase cycles were attained by the application of electrical pulses. It is observed that the write and erase operations can not be performed for the given write and erase pulses after 3500 number of cycles. The resistivity drop of the amorphous state of the memory device after a number of write-erase cycles is also discussed in this paper.