14 February 2008

	The main author of the paper, Rob Simpson, holding one of the films described in the work

The Novel Glass and Fibre Group's latest work on electrical phase change has been published in a paper which has been chosen as ‘Letter of the Month’ in Electronics Letters.

Phase change materials are rapidly gaining interest for application in the next generation of memory. These memory chips promise faster reading and writing speeds, longer lifetimes and much greater capacity than the memory we currently carry around in our ipods, digital camera, computers and mobile phones. The ORC has been developing new memory materials, based on novel chalcogenide glasses. Recent work on copper doped films based on gallium lanthanum sulphide demonstrated high resisitivity in both on and off state which promises devices with much lower power requirements than current memory chips.

Chalcogenide glass

Electronic Letters is renowned for its publication of the most significant advances across the entire field of electrical engineering and is the most highly cited journal in its field.

The paper ‘Electrical phase change of Ga:La:S:CU films’ by R.E. Simpson, A. Mairaj, R.J. Curry, C.-C. Huang, K. Knight, N. Sessions, M. Hassan and D.W. Hewak was published in Electronics Letters, volume 43, issue 15 (2007) and was selected by the editors to be featured on the Electronics Letters homepage during August 2007 as ‘Letter of the Month’.

Posted by Rachel Abbott, Marketing Officer, on 14 February 2008.