As size downscaling and operation speed increasing, understanding thermal dissipation of phase-change random access memory (PCRAM) during pulse interval is of great importance to gain an insight into its internal transient thermal dissipation behavior. A simplified transient thermal dissipation model and a method of extracting time constants, thermal resistances and capacities in the pulse domain based on the resistance-to-pulse-number (R-PN) curve are proposed. The results show that the R-PN curve calculated by the compact HSPICE model agrees with the one by an experiment. Though this simplified transient thermal dissipation model is obtained under the condition of short pulse interval, it can be available for the transient temperature simulation of a cell under any conditions, especially for understanding thermal behavior of cycle times and programmable synapse based on phase-change materials. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.