Abstract
Nonvolatile memory technologies in Si-based electronics date back to the 1990s. Ferroelectric field-effect transistor (FeFET) was one of the most promising devices replacing the conventional Flash memory facing physical scaling limitations at those times. A variant of charge storage memory referred to as Flash memory is widely used in consumer electronic products such as cell phones and music players while NAND Flash-based solid-state disks (SSDs) are increasingly displacing hard disk drives as the primary storage device in laptops, desktops, and even data centers. The integration limit of Flash memories is approaching, and many new types of memory to replace conventional Flash memories have been proposed. Emerging memory technologies promise new memories to store more data at less cost than the expensive-to-build silicon chips used by popular consumer gadgets including digital cameras, cell phones and portable music players. They are being investigated and lead to the future as potential alternatives to existing memories in future computing systems. Emerging nonvolatile memory technologies such as magnetic random-access memory (MRAM), spin-transfer torque random-access memory (STT-RAM), ferroelectric random-access memory (FeRAM), phase-change memory (PCM), and resistive random-access memory (RRAM) combine the speed of static random-access memory (SRAM), the density of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), and the nonvolatility of Flash memory and so become very attractive as another possibility for future memory hierarchies. Many other new classes of emerging memory technologies such as transparent and plastic, three-dimensional (3-D), and quantum dot memory technologies have also gained tremendous popularity in recent years. Subsequently, not an exaggeration to say that computer memory could soon earn the ultimate commercial validation for commercial scale-up and production the cheap plastic knockoff. Therefore, this review is devoted to the rapidly developing new class of memory technologies and scaling of scientific procedures based on an investigation of recent progress in advanced Flash memory devices.
Highlights
General overview The idea of using a floating gate (FG) device to obtain a nonvolatile memory device was suggested for the first time in 1967 by Kahng D and Sze SM at Bell Labs [1]
There are several emerging technologies aiming to go beyond those limitations and potentially replace all or most of the existing semiconductor memory technologies to become a universal semiconductor memory (USM)
With great progress being made in the emerging memory technologies, current trends and limitations were discussed before leading to some insight into the generation of memory products
Summary
General overview The idea of using a floating gate (FG) device to obtain a nonvolatile memory device was suggested for the first time in 1967 by Kahng D and Sze SM at Bell Labs [1]. Flash memory adopts a charge stored in a silicon nitride as the trapping layer, which exhibits significantly reduced defect-related leakage current and very low SILC as compared to SiO2 with a similar EOT [64] Such a relentless reduction of device dimensions has many challenges like retention, endurance, reduction in the number of electrons in the FG, dielectric leakage, cell-to-cell cross talk, threshold voltage shift, and reduction in memory window margins [65,66]. There are many emerging memory technologies which are trying to replace existing memory technologies in the market These new memory devices such as RRAM, PCM, and STT-RAM have read/write/retention/endurance characteristics different from those of conventional SRAM, DRAM, and Flash [82]. These new technologies will almost certainly result in more complex memory hierarchies than their family memories, they are likely to allow the construction of memory chips that are nonvolatile, have low energy, and have density and development close to or better than those of DRAM chips, with improved performance and allowing memory systems to continue to scale up
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