Chalcogenide phase change materials enable non-volatile, low-latency storage-class memory. They are also being explored for new forms of computing such as neuromorphic and in-memory computing. A key challenge, however, is the temporal drift in the electrical resistance of the amorphous states that encode data. Drift, caused by the spontaneous structural relaxation of the newly recreated melt-quenched amorphous phase, has consistently been observed to have a logarithmic dependence in time. Here, we show that this observation is valid only in a certain observable timescale. Using threshold-switching voltage as the measured variable, based on temperature-dependent and short timescale electrical characterization, we experimentally measure the onset of drift. This additional feature of the structural relaxation dynamics serves as a new benchmark to appraise the different classical models to explain drift.

中文翻译：

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熔体淬火相变材料结构弛豫开始的测量

硫族化物相变材料可实现非易失性、低延迟的存储级存储器。他们也正在探索新的计算形式，例如神经形态和内存计算。然而，一个关键的挑战是编码数据的非晶态电阻的时间漂移​​。漂移是由新重建的熔融淬火非晶相的自发结构松弛引起的，一直被观察到具有时间对数依赖性。在这里，我们表明这种观察仅在某个可观察的时间尺度内有效。使用阈值开关电压作为测量变量，基于温度相关和短时间尺度的电气特性，我们通过实验测量漂移的开始。