Guest Editors’ Introduction: Critical and Enabling Techniques for Emerging Memories

Abstract

The severe concerns about continuous scaling of mainstream memories motivated recent globalwise research on emerging memory technologies. Many promising characteristics, i.e., high integration density, nonvolatility, fast access time, good CMOS process compatibility, and radiation resilience, are demonstrated by various emerging memory candidates. Some of these technologies, such as phase change memory (PCM), spintronic memory, resistive memory (memristor), and ferroelectric memory, have been also prototyped or even productized. However, there exist many technical obstacles that prevent these emerging memories from being widely adopted in commercial applications. These challenges may come from device and design reliability, testing complexity and cost, architecture modification and adoptability, and innovative applications that can maximize the advantages of these technologies. Critical techniques that can assure not only the performance and reliability of emerging memory designs but also their easy and efficient use become essential to the technology adoption and of particular interest to the industry practices.