Impact of short SET pulse sequence on electronic switching in Phase Change Memory arrays

In this work we electrically characterized a population of 512 Kb PCM cells in order to statistically analyze the electronic switching phenomenon. Statistical distributions due to both technological dispersion and the intrinsic nature of the process are evaluated. In particular the statistics about the formation of the first polycrystalline grain percolation path (time to shunt) can be extracted from the experimental data and used to provide a deeper insight into the physical nature of the phenomenon. We studied the impact of a sequence of short pulses on the electronic switching behavior and showed that experimental results are in agreement with an analytical physical model presented in literature. Results also show that the shunt percolation path linearly grows in size until saturation occurs.