Nonvolatile memories: Present and future challenges

Due to the rapid development of hand-held electronic devices, the need for high density, low power, high performance SoCs has pushed the well-established embedded memory technologies to their limits. To overcome the existing memory issues, emerging memory technologies are being developed and implemented. The focus is placed on non-volatile technologies, which should meet the high demands of tomorrow applications. The nonvolatile memory technologies being intensively researched today are the Flash memories and the emerging resistive and magnetic type random access memories. This paper presents an overview of device level operation of these nonvolatile memories, with special emphasis on the fabrication-and aging-induced reliability issues.