Phase-change materials are already used to store data on rewritable discs, but their relatively high power requirements make them impractical for use in mobile phones and other portable devices. Now, researchers in the US have found a way to decrease the volume of phase-change material in the memory bit, cutting power requirements 100-fold compared with the best devices on the market today.
Phase-change materials are the active material in rewritable DVDs and are usually made of chalcogenides like germanium antimony telluride – GST for short. Using voltage pulses to produce heat, the materials are switched between an amorphous state ("off") and crystalline state ("on"). The amorphous state has a very high resistance and the crystalline state a very low resistance.
The work was described in Sciencexpress doi:10.1126/science.1201938.
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