Spontaneous structural relaxation is intrinsic to glassy materials due to their metastable nature. For phase-change materials, the resultant temporal change in electrical resistance seriously hampers neuromorphic computing applications. Here we report an ab-initio-calculation-informed design of amorphous phase-change materials composed of robust ‘molecule-like’ motifs, depriving the amorphous alloy of critical structural ingredients responsible for relaxation and, hence, resistance drift. We demonstrate amorphous CrTe3 thin films that display practically no resistance drift at any working temperature from −200 °C to 165 °C, and highlight the multilevel encoding ability via a hybrid opto-electronic approach. We further reveal that the same no-drift behaviour holds for melt-quenched amorphous CrTe3 in electronic devices. Moreover, the application potential of CrTe3 is testified by its incorporation in a vehicle with an automatic path-tracking function. Our work provides an alternative route to achieve requisite properties for potential phase-change neuromorphic computing via the judicious design of disordered phase-change materials.

Link:Amorphous phase-change memory alloy with no resistance drift | Nature Materials