Floating gate memories: moore's law continues

Abstract

Floating gate memories are the mainstream of flash non volatile memories and have followed Moore's law scaling through multiple technology generations, representing one of the fastest growing memory segments. Looking forward, maintaining the pace of Moore's law scaling is increasingly difficult. The challenging areas include electrical, physical and reliability characteristics of the memory cell. However, through innovative device design, introduction of new materials and memory error management, we anticipate that floating gate flash memories are economically viable beyond 45 nm to 32 nm. In this paper, the physical and electrical scaling challenges as well as possible solutions are discussed. Further, more complex, structural innovations may be possible to maintain further scaling.