Prospect of Emerging Nonvolatile Memories
- PDF / 289,947 Bytes
- 9 Pages / 595 x 842 pts (A4) Page_size
- 40 Downloads / 225 Views
D7.6.1
Prospect of Emerging Nonvolatile Memories Hongsik Jeong & Kinam Kim Advanced Technology Development, Memory Device Business, Samsung Electronics Co., San #24, Nongseo-Lee, Kiheung-Eup, Yongin-City, Kyungki-Do, Korea ABSTRACT Conventional nonvolatile memories such as Flash and EEPROM memory have successfully evolved toward high density and low cost. Especially, the market and density of flash memories has grown rapidly which leads semiconductor technology. However, there have been concerns about whether this successful progress can be maintained in the future nano era and can satisfy the requirement of diversified future IT market. Flash memories have the advantage of high density with small cell size and by contraries the disadvantage of slow writing speed and limited endurance. This slow writing speed and limited endurance is not aligned with the trend of high speed and reliability for future semiconductor memories. The future for these conventional nonvolatile memories forces many research groups and companies to develop alternative memories with ideal memory characteristics such as non-volatility, high density, high speed, and low power, which none of the conventional memories can satisfy at the same time. In this article, I will evaluate the characteristics of future nonvolatile memories such as ferroelectric random access memory (FRAM), magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) and phase change random access memory (PRAM). These memories have been recently evaluated because of the possibility that they can overcome the challenges that conventional memories are facing. Finally we will review critical technology barriers in developing future memory and predict the promising technology to overcome the barriers in conventional and emerging new memories, which will be technology guidelines for future memory development. INTRODUCTION Conventional nonvolatile memories are facing many technical challenges which are growing more and more sever as they try to keep up with the trend toward higher density, lower cost and higher performance. Growing difficulties in the future of conventional type memories have prompted many efforts to develop new and ideal memories that have less technical barriers, longer lifetime and better performance. However, in the view of the growing technical complexity, fabrication cost and physical limit, there have been concerns about whether this successful progress can be maintained in the future nano era. Among the many roadblocks to lie ahead on the road of these conventional memories, the most critical questions to be answered are that at what technology node these conventional memories are no longer properly working and what makes this. In order to find the answer, extensive investigations are being undertaken at every corner of the technologies. [1~3] At present, we do not have any conclusive answer, but we can figure out what are the show stoppers of these conventional memories. For instance, in the case of NOR Flash memory, technology scaling below certain physical size may no
Data Loading...
