Research On Thermal Design Of 3D XPoint Memory

In information age,the amount of data grows rapidly,so are people's requirements on memory.After the iteration from magnetic storage to flash memory,phase change memory(PCRAM)is considered to be one of the most potential storage technologies to replace flash memory,but reliability issues caused by thermal crosstalk restrict PCRAM storage density and its commercialization.In recent years,the 3D XPoint memory based on multi-layer stacking have achieved higher storage densities at the same process size and caught people's eyes.However,3D XPoint memory is essentially phase change memory,and its multi-layer structure also leads to the interaction between memory cells in the vertical direction compared with the traditional planar structure,resulting in more complicated thermal design problems.Therefore,thermal design research on 3D XPoint memory is particularly important.In this paper,the 3D XPoint memory is modeled by finite element analysis method.The heat distribution of two typical structure of 3D XPoint memory,the horizontal and the vertical electrode structure,is compared.It is found that the vertical electrode structure is more efficient but suffers more serious thermal crosstalk.In addition,thermal crosstalk caused by changes in structural parameters and scaling is also analyzed,providing a basis for optimizing the structural design of 3D XPoint memory.Furthermore,this paper discussed the influence on the performance of 3D XPoint memory caused by the thermoelectric effect of the phase-change material,which is often neglected.It is found that the effect of thermoelectric effect on the heating efficiency is closely related to size.The influence of thermoelectric effect on thermal crosstalk phenomenon shifts from negative to positive and gradually increases with the reduction on the contact area between materials,providing a new idea for optimizing the thermal design of 3D XPoint memory.