Electrical and heat conduction mechanisms of GeTe alloy for phase change memory application

GeTe alloy has drawn much attention as one of the promising candidates for phase change memory application. In this work, the electrical resistivities and thermal conductivities of GeTe alloy have been determined as functions of temperature by the four-terminal method and hot strip method, respectively. The electrical resistivity increases and the thermal conductivity decreases monotonically with increasing temperature, and thus it is likely that free electron dominates the thermal conduction. The electrical resistivity increases slowly with time during holding at 773 K, and the thermal conductivity decreases corresponding to the change of the electrical resistivity, which suggests that small amount of high temperature phase might exist in the samples. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4751018]