Non‐volatile memories: Materials, nanostructures and integration approaches

Abstract

Dear reader, The following pages are the result of the exciting investigations presented during the Symposium AA of the 2015 E-MRS Spring Conference “Non-volatile memories: materials, nanostructures and integration approaches”, aimed to gather the newest and most significant studies in the field of materials and materials-related concepts for non-volatile memories (NVM), devices at the heart of all appliances that need to handle and keep information during power cycling. The increasing need for high density data storage systems in different types of applications has created a significant research effort to develop memory concepts using novel functional materials. Improving the scalability and performance of these new devices is a multi-disciplinary task, which spans from molecular dynamics to solid state physics, to manufacturing process. These aspects make the NVM field most appealing to the research related to materials with application potential, making the conference an excellent platform to share, make visible and disseminate the work done in this field in Europe and beyond. The topics covered were from the basic science to the materials research challenges, as well as key integration strategies for future technologies. Contribution areas included semiconductor-based memories, flash magnetic memories, ferroelectric systems, chalcogenide- based phase change memory, resistive RAM featuring novel dielectrics and neuromorphic concepts, conductive bridge RAM based on innovative nanostructured configurations and oxide stacks. These subject areas were presented as oral and poster contributions and are nicely represented by the papers of this special issue, which includes four featured articles discussing the recent progress in peripheral CMOS devices for DRAM 1, the reliability of electrochemical metallization memories and conductive bridge RAM as linked with their selected device structures 2, a modelling investigation to understand the role of the material properties of oxide-based resistive RAM devices on the electrical behaviour at circuit level 3, and a new concept to extend the life of planar NAND beyond the 20 nm node, namely hybrid floating gate 4. Topics were motivated with presentations of experts of each subject. We are thankful to their participation as they helped to invigorate the discussion among the participants. Their names are Alessio Spessot (Micron), Ilia Valov (Research Center Jülich), Julie Grollier (CNRS/Thalès), Luca Larcher (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia), Marco Bernasconi (Università di Milano Bicocca), Paolo Cappelletti (Micron) and Robin Roelofs (ASM). The symposium owes a great deal of gratitude to all the scientists who helped in the revision of the submitted abstracts, giving their expert opinion and generous time, allowing us to have a Symposium of great quality. Here are their names: Alex Kotov, Andrea Fantini, Christian Walczyk, Claudia Wiemer, Damien Querlioz, Daniele Ielmini, Etienne Janod, Gabriele Navarro, Hilde Hardtdegen, Jaakko Akoda, Juergen Schubert, Laurent Vila, Lucian Prejebeanu, Magali Putero, Robert Muller, Roberto Fallica, Sabina Spiga, Stephane Mangin and Valeri Afanas'ev. We would also like to thank the students that helped in the organization, namely: Simone Selmo (CNR, Italy), Michael Chen (imec, Belgium) and Adrien Le Goff (University of Paris Sud, France). Finally, the Symposium would not have been possible without the financial support of E-MRS headquarters and the sponsorship of Micron Foundation. Judit G. Lisoni On behalf of the Guest Editors Damien Deleruyelle, Ludovic Goux, Massimo Longo, Dafiné Ravelosona