High Endurance Nanoscale TiN Bottom Heater for Phase Change Memory

In this work a highly reliable blade-type TiN bottom heater is prepared with the contact size down to <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$3 \text{nm} \times 150 \text{nm}$</tex> which contributes to the improved heating efficiency and high switching performance of phase change memory (PCM). The TiN thin film is deposited by atomic layer deposition (ALD) on 12-inch wafer. It shows good thickness uniformity and deposition conformality. The TiN bottom heater exhibits high endurance performance over 1E12 cycles. A cyclic switching endurance of more than 1E7 cycles is demonstrated in the TiN bottom heater enabled PCM cells.