Use of Eutectic Effects in the Possible Creation of PCM Memory Cells on the Basis Ag–Cu Nanoclusters

Abstract

—An attractive direction in the development of nanoelectronics is the development of a new generation of non-volatile storage devices, namely, electric phase memory or PC-RAM (Phase Change Random Access Memory). However, there are a number of unresolved problems here, such as: the stability of the amorphous phase, high power consumption, long information recording time, etc. In order to resolve these contradictions, a new approach was proposed, which consists in the use of Ag–Cu binary alloy nanoparticles as PC-RAM cells. To this end, the molecular dynamics method was used to study the processes of structurization of nanoparticles of this alloy with a size D = 2–10 nm of various target compositions with a variation in the rate of removal of thermal energy. Criteria for the stability of the amorphous and crystalline structure were evaluated, and conclusions were drawn about the target composition and size of nanoparticles suitable for creating phase-change memory cells. It was shown that in the case of the use of nanoparticles of the binary Ag–Cu alloy, it is possible to reduce the size of one cell to 6–8 nm, reduce the time of recording information to 2.5 ns, and, for the first time, based on the eutectic approach, achieve the stability of the amorphous and crystalline structure at different rates of thermal energy removal.