Nanosecond and Energy-Efficient Radio-Frequency Switching Enabled by Sb2Te Phase-Change Thin-Films

This work reports the first demonstration of a high-speed and low-power RF phase-change switch based on Sb2Te thin-films. The device exploits the thermally induced phase transition of Sb2Te, enabling reversible switching between a low-resistance crystalline state and a high-resistance amorphous state within 100ns under pulsed voltage excitation, with a total energy consumption of approximately 60nJ. Over the DC–67GHz frequency range, the switch exhibits an insertion loss of less than 0.9dB, and the isolation is higher than 18dB. These results confirm that phase-change RF switches maintain excellent performance in the mm-wave regime and show strong potential as key components for future 6G THz communication systems.