It is our pleasure to introduce this special issue in which are summarised recent progresses in the rapidly developing field of phase-change memories (PCM or PRAM), from fundamental understanding and scientific knowledge of their unique properties toward their straightforward applications, as well as some of their most promising novel perspectives. We hope that this issue will provide a snapshot of the latest developments for scientific and technological advances of the PCMs, so as to provide an exhaustive overview of the state-of-the-art and future trends. Indeed, the history of phase-change memories, which offer a unique set of features (multi-level storage, fast read/write latency, nonvolatility, good cycling endurance, and good scalability even when downscaling beyond lithographic limits), is reviewed here from their discovery more than 50 years ago toward its current leading position among emerging memory technologies, to fill the performance gap between volatile DRAM and non-volatile Flash memories. This has led PCM to play today a major role in the storage class memory arena and also for the emerging neuromorphic and in-memory computing applications, as reviewed by Fantini [1]. PCM are currently the most mature among the various kinds of emerging memories, as demonstrated in high density standalone memories. The latter meet the requirements of embedded Non-Volatile Memories (eNVM), as fullfilled by the ePCM (embedded PCM) technology that is described in the paper from Capelletti et al.[2]. It is demonstrated that the potential for ePCM will become the mainstream eNVM technology, at CMOS 28nm node and below …