Compact Electro-Thermal Model for Thermal Cross-talk Analysis in PCM Arrays

Phase change memory (PCM) is one of the frontrunners among the emerging non-volatile memory technologies. Even though a Joule-heating-induced phase change mechanism has been demonstrated down to a few nanometer dimensions, a key factor that could possibly limit the scaling trends in a PCM memory array is the thermal cross-talk between adjacent cells. In this article we present a compact electro-thermal model for investigating potential thermal cross-talk issues in highly dense PCM arrays. The proposed model can be used as a simple yet powerful tool to perform the otherwise computationally intensive thermal analysis for the PCM array using finite element modeling approaches. Besides providing an accurate measure of spatial and temporal thermal variations across the cell, this modeling approach can also provide insights for the PCM cell design, scaling aspects as well as solutions to mitigate the thermal crosstalk problem.