The influence of resistance drift on measurements of the activation energy of conduction for phase-change material in random access memory line cells

Temporal drift of the amorphous resistance in phase-change random access memory (PRAM) is a temperature accelerated process. Increasing the temperature will speed up the drift process which is shown to affect measurements of the activation energy of conduction (Ea, slope of log(R) versus 1/kT). Doped SbTe phase change (PRAM) line cells were brought to the amorphous state and were subjected to annealing experiments. First, it is shown that when the temperature is increased by a fixed rate, the resistance does not follow a unique function of temperature but depends on the heating rate. This can be attributed to resistance drift taking place during the ramp. Upon cooling, the drift process freezes and only then physically relevant, i.e., time independent, values for Ea can be obtained, because of the absence of additional drift. The observed increase in resistance as a function of annealing history (for various frozen-in drift levels) is modeled and well-reproduced using a trap limited band transport model. The model explains these observations by an increase of the temperature dependent band gap by about 47 meV due to drift at 418 K. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4759239