R&D: Material Challenges for NVM

APL Materials has published an article written by Bhagwati Prasad, Materials Engineering Department, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, KA, 560012, India, Stuart Parkin, Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, 06120 Halle, Germany, Themis Prodromaki, Centre for Electronics Frontiers, School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH9 3BF, United Kingdom, Chang-Beom Eom, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA, Jordi Sort, Departament de Física, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra, Spain, and Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Passeig Lluís Companys 23, 08010 Barcelona, Spain, and J. L. MacManus-Driscoll, Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, University of Cambridge, 27 Charles Babbage Road, Cambridge CB3 0FS, United Kingdom.

Abstract: “This Special Issue is focused on the material challenges for emerging nonvolatile memory technologies. Over the last few decades, several materials have been explored for memory applications. There is an urgent need for material innovations for developing emerging data storage technologies, driven by the inherent limitations of current computational systems, e.g., the ‘memory wall,’ and high power consumption. The ‘memory wall’ problem of the current von-Neumann architecture is that the time to move and store data is orders of magnitude slower than the computation speed. The computational architecture includes several types of memories, such as the static random-access memory (SRAM), with a response time of ∼1 ns and virtually unlimited endurance but with low areal density due to the six-transistor configuration, or the dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), with a response time of ∼10 ns. The areal density of DRAM is higher than SRAM because of its one-transistor one-capacitor configuration. Storage class memory (SCM) is a new level in the hierarchy, being between main memory (DRAM) and storage memory and it is non-volatile. Although the response times of DRAM and SRAM are much higher than SCM, they are volatile and so do not retain information when powered down. The higher density, lower cost, and higher-speed SCM can function as a non-volatile DRAM.“