Structured Materials to Develop Chalcogenide CVD Deposition Tool for Non-Volatile Memory

Structured Materials Industries, Inc. (SMI) announced that it has been awarded a Phase I SBIR by the National Science Foundation to develop a high throughput, large area, Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) tool for the production of device grade chalcogenide films for chalcogenide random access memory (C-RAM) non-volatile memory. C-RAMs are a very promising non-volatile memory material for high speed high density memories. However, current state-of-the-art C-RAM technology relies on sputtering to deposit the active chalcogenide layer, which limits further device improvement because of difficulties in meeting requirements for device conformality, film adherence and compositional control and wafer yield. SMI has been working on MOCVD of chalcogenides for the past two years with federal, commercial and internal support, and has a patent pending on MOCVD technology for CRAM making. Under the new program, SMI will develop and commercialize custom tools for C-RAM film production.