(Invited) Innovative Embedded Non-Volatile Memories: Flexibility and Reliability

Conventional memory technologies are facing nowadays many challenges such as miniaturization limits and reliability issues. In the last years, 3D integration strategies showed how Flash memory can still dominate the stand-alone market in the near future, mainly driven by the increasing demand of data storage in portable applications. However, in a technology context in rapid evolution and differentiation, where the microcontrollers market is growing fast becoming more and more price sensitive, the embedded non-volatile memories (eNVM) represent a key element for rapid product customization. Moreover, if the parallel and fast computing is pushing the CMOS platform towards aggressive technology nodes, back-end-of-line (BEOL) memory solutions can represent a real compromise between performances and cost saving.

Innovative NVMs such as resistive ram solutions (e.g. Phase-Change Memory), recently showed how they can represent a real breakthrough in terms of increasing performances, power consumption lowering and cost reduction. This is also due to their CMOS-compatible fabrication, and easy BEOL integration. Material engineering and architecture optimization demonstrated how these technologies can even target extreme specifications required in such applications as industrial or automotive.

In this talk we present the main features of emerging resistive NVM solutions, and how target specifications can be satisfied by material tuning, architectures engineering and specific programming techniques.