Measuring Complex for Studying Temperature Dependences of the Electrical Resistance of Chalcogenide Materials in the Solid and Liquid States

Currently, phase-change chalcogenide materials are actively used to create nonvolatile electrical and optical memory, as well as various tunable photonics devices. The principle of converting chalcogenide materials from a crystalline to an amorphous state is based on the melting process. Determining the parameters of the crystal-melt phase transition and the associated processes affecting the phase-changing material is critically important from the standpoint of further increasing the number of working cycles and optimizing the parameters of the devices being created, including energy consumption. The paper presents the results of the development, creation and launch of a hardware and software complex for measuring the electrical resistance of chalcogenide materials during heating. The developed hardware and software complex allows measurements of temperature dependences of electrical resistance of various semiconductor materials, including in a molten state, from room temperature to a temperature of 800°C both in air and in an inert atmosphere. The functionality of the hardware and software complex was tested on selenium and tellurium. The measurement results showed high convergence with literature data and the results of differential scanning calorimetry.