TY - JOUR
T1 - The role of arsenic in the operation of sulfur-based electrical threshold switches
AU - Wu, Renjie
AU - Gu, Rongchuan
AU - Gotoh, Tamihiro
AU - Zhao, Zihao
AU - Sun, Yuting
AU - Jia, Shujing
AU - Miao, Xiangshui
AU - Elliott, Stephen R.
AU - Zhu, Min
AU - Xu, Ming
AU - Song, Zhitang
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, Springer Nature Limited.
PY - 2023/12
Y1 - 2023/12
N2 - Arsenic is an essential dopant in conventional silicon-based semiconductors and emerging phase-change memory (PCM), yet the detailed functional mechanism is still lacking in the latter. Here, we fabricate chalcogenide-based ovonic threshold switching (OTS) selectors, which are key units for suppressing sneak currents in 3D PCM arrays, with various As concentrations. We discovered that incorporation of As into GeS brings >100 °C increase in crystallization temperature, remarkably improving the switching repeatability and prolonging the device lifetime. These benefits arise from strengthened As-S bonds and sluggish atomic migration after As incorporation, which reduces the leakage current by more than an order of magnitude and significantly suppresses the operational voltage drift, ultimately enabling a back-end-of-line-compatible OTS selector with >12 MA/cm2 on-current, ~10 ns speed, and a lifetime approaching 1010 cycles after 450 °C annealing. These findings allow the precise performance control of GeSAs-based OTS materials for high-density 3D PCM applications.
AB - Arsenic is an essential dopant in conventional silicon-based semiconductors and emerging phase-change memory (PCM), yet the detailed functional mechanism is still lacking in the latter. Here, we fabricate chalcogenide-based ovonic threshold switching (OTS) selectors, which are key units for suppressing sneak currents in 3D PCM arrays, with various As concentrations. We discovered that incorporation of As into GeS brings >100 °C increase in crystallization temperature, remarkably improving the switching repeatability and prolonging the device lifetime. These benefits arise from strengthened As-S bonds and sluggish atomic migration after As incorporation, which reduces the leakage current by more than an order of magnitude and significantly suppresses the operational voltage drift, ultimately enabling a back-end-of-line-compatible OTS selector with >12 MA/cm2 on-current, ~10 ns speed, and a lifetime approaching 1010 cycles after 450 °C annealing. These findings allow the precise performance control of GeSAs-based OTS materials for high-density 3D PCM applications.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85172829395
U2 - 10.1038/s41467-023-41643-6
DO - 10.1038/s41467-023-41643-6
M3 - 文章
C2 - 37773231
AN - SCOPUS:85172829395
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 14
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
IS - 1
M1 - 6095
ER -