Mobile electronics, the Internet, artificial intelligence, big data and high-performance computing are changing our lives rapidly and profoundly. They also pose, however, a major challenge on data storage and processing: the volume of digital information across the globe doubles every two years, set to reach 44 zettabytes (4.4 × 10E10 terabytes) by 2020. Phase-change materials based random access memories (PRAMs) are the leading new technology to cope with such data crisis.

    Writing in Nature Materials, Martin Salinga and co-workers now from IBM and RWTH Aachen University report a new design of PCM with aggressively miniaturized memory cell volume down to only 3 nm along the vertical direction, towards increased storage density and reduced power consumption per operation. Nature Materials 17, 681-685 (2018).

Prof. Wei Zhang from Xi'an Jiaotong University and Prof. Evan Ma from Johns Hopkins University were invited to write a News&Views article on this topic, in which the key achievements of the work by Salinga et al. were reviewed, and the remaining challenges and prospective opportunities of phase-change materials were highlighted. See W. Zhang & E. Ma, Phase-change memory: Single-element glass to record data. Nature Materials 17, 654-655 (2018). 

    Link： https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-018-0114-5

Fig. 1 | Amorphous Sb in PCM device. a, At room temperature, the Sb film that normally crystallizes instantly (left panel) can stay amorphous for 10E2–10E5 seconds, when it is only a few nanometres thick and confined between SiO2 layers (right panel). Brown lines represent bonds between Sb atoms in the film. b, The lifetime of amorphous Sb before crystallization sets in increases with decreasing film thickness, reaching 50.8 hours at 20 °C (vertical line) for the 3 nm case.