The promise of phase-change materials

The emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques and their rapid proliferation across a myriad of industries provide a driving force for improving computing, data storage, and telecommunication hardware architectures. The current generation and use of huge volumes of data will only increase as smart devices, such as autonomous vehicles, utility meters, and medical implants, report out data. To manage this torrent of information, fast data storage and processing devices with low noise and drift that can be manufactured with small physical footprints, in increasingly more intelligent computing architectures, are needed. On page 210 of this issue, Ding et al. (1) demonstrate chalcogenide phasechange heterostructures that take advantage of thin phase-change layers interspaced with nanoscale diffusion barriers. The resulting phase-change electronic memories have ultralow noise, drift, and high endurance and may have wide-ranging applications beyond traditional data storage.