“This work is fundamental but promising,” said Aaron Lindenberg, an associate professor at Stanford. “A thousandfold increase in speed coupled with lower energy use suggests a path toward future memory technologies that could far outperform anything previously demonstrated.”
While the work is based on the chalcegonide materials used previously in PCMs, it focuses on the brief interval when the amorphous structure begins to switch to crystalline – when a digital zero became a digital one, also known as the ‘amorphous on’ phase.
The researchers jolted a small sample of amorphous material with an electrical field comparable in strength to a lightning strike and found the amorphous-on state occurred in less than 1ps.
The team suggests this could mean that PCM could store data many times faster than conventional RAM for tasks that require memory and processors to work together.