Amorphous phase-change memory alloy with no resistance drift

Spontaneous structural relaxation is intrinsic to glassy materials due to their metastable nature. For phase-change materials, the resultant temporal change in electrical resistance seriously hampers neuromorphic computing applications. Here we report an ab-initio-calculation-informed design of amorphous phase-change materials composed of robust ‘molecule-like’ motifs, depriving the amorphous alloy of critical structural ingredients responsible for relaxation and, hence, resistance drift. We demonstrate amorphous CrTe₃ thin films that display practically no resistance drift at any working temperature from −200 °C to 165 °C, and highlight the multilevel encoding ability via a hybrid opto-electronic approach. We further reveal that the same no-drift behaviour holds for melt-quenched amorphous CrTe₃ in electronic devices. Moreover, the application potential of CrTe₃ is testified by its incorporation in a vehicle with an automatic path-tracking function. Our work provides an alternative route to achieve requisite properties for potential phase-change neuromorphic computing via the judicious design of disordered phase-change materials.