Non-volatile memory technologies: emerging concepts and new materials

The current mainstream, based on the Flash technology, is expected to be the reference technology also for the next few years. Nevertheless Flash has technological and physical constraints that make more difficult their further scaling. In this contest there is the industrial interest for alternative technologies that exploit new materials and concepts to go beyond the Flash technology, to allow better scaling, and to enlarge the memory performance. The main emerging nonvolatile memory technologies based on inorganic material, like ferroelectric memory (FeRAM), magnetoresistive memory (MRAM) or phase change memory (PCM) and the main innovative concepts based on organic material like ferroelectric or conductance switching polymer will therefore be analysed. We will then focus the attention on PCM technology as one of the best candidate as next-decade non-volatile memory technology, covering the main characteristics and presenting the latest development results. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.