Providing equal cell programming conditions across a large and high density array of phase-change memory cells

An integrated circuit device comprising:

• a plurality of bitlines and a plurality of wordlines;
• a plurality of memory cells each of which has a structural phase-change material to store data and being coupled between a corresponding bitline-wordline pair of the plurality of bitlines and the plurality of wordlines;
• and
• means for reducing variation in cell voltage across the plurality of memory cells as a programming pulse is applied to each bitline-wordline pair of the plurality of bitlines and wordlines.

A method for designing an integrated circuit, comprising:

• creating a representation of a plurality of bitlines and a plurality of wordlines to be built into the integrated circuit;
• creating a representation of a plurality of memory cells to be built into the integrated circuit, each cell to have a structural phase-change material to store data and to be coupled between a corresponding bitline-wordline pair of the plurality of bitlines and the plurality of wordlines;
• and
• creating a representation of a plurality of bitline compensation elements and a plurality of wordline compensation elements to be built into the integrated circuit, each bitline compensation element to be coupled in series with a separate one of the plurality of bitlines, and each wordline compensation element to be coupled in series with a separate one of the plurality of wordlines, said plurality of bitline and wordline compensation elements having resistances selected so that the variation in a sum of (1) the resistance along the corresponding bitline of a cell between a first terminal of the cell and a far terminal of the bitline compensation element that is coupled to the corresponding bitline and (2) the resistance along the corresponding wordline of the cell between a second terminal of the cell and a far terminal of the wordline compensation element that is coupled to the corresponding wordline, is minimized across the plurality of memory cells.