Guest Editorial Emerging Memories—Technology, Architecture and Applications (First Issue)

Abstract

Since CMOS technology is approaching the end of scaling roadmap, there is a need to explore alternative technologies to assist or replace CMOS technology. Furthermore, the growth in new application areas such as data analytics, Internet-of-Things (IoT), cognitive computing, cloud computing and fog computing requires new features that are not readily available in CMOS technology. Emerging memories can potentially solve the scalability issues and cater to the new applications by providing features such as non-volatility and resistive computation. The properties of emerging memory technologies such as Spin Transfer Torque RAM (STTRAM) and Resistive RAM (ReRAM) can also be altered by changing the materials, shape and design. Therefore, these memories could be customized to suit target application or make trade-off between various design parameters such as density, latency, power and performance. For designing meaningful circuits and systems using emerging memories, it is also important to identify their limitations and solve those using appropriate techniques. This special issue covers the opportunities presented by the emerging memory technologies across the design hierarchy and their associated challenges. It introduces alternate structures, technologies and methodologies to mitigate the limitations of emerging memories. Circuit, architecture and applications built around the emerging memory technologies are also provided.