Rules of hierarchical melt and coordinate bond to design crystallization in doped phase change materials.

While alloy design has practically shown an efficient strategy to mediate two seemingly conflicted performances of writing speed and data retention in phase-change memory, the detailed kinetic pathway of alloy-tuned crystallization is still unclear. Here, we propose hierarchical melt and coordinate bond strategies to solve them, where the former stabilizes a medium-range crystal-like region and the latter provides a rule to stabilize amorphous. The ErSbTe compound we designed achieves writing speed of 3.2 ns and ten-year data retention of 161 °C. We provide a direct atomic-level evidence that two neighbor Er atoms stabilize a medium-range crystal-like region, acting as a precursor to accelerate crystallization; meanwhile, the stabilized amorphous originates from the formation of coordinate bonds by sharing lone-pair electrons of chalcogenide atoms with the empty 5d orbitals of Er atoms. The two rules pave the way for the development of storage-class memory with comprehensive performance to achieve next technological node.