Dresden 2006 – scientific programme

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DS: Dünne Schichten

DS 5: Internal Symposium “Functional thin films - future applications and challenges”

DS 5.2: Invited Talk

Monday, March 27, 2006, 14:45–15:30, GER 37

New Materials Approaches for Advanced Nonvolatile Memories — •Thomas Mikolajick — Infineon Technologies Dresden, Koenigsbrücker Strasse 180, 01099 Dresden

Driven by the rapid development of mobile applications the market for nonvolatile memory devices is rapidly growing. Today, the vast majority of nonvolatile memory devices are based on the floating gate device. The floating gate transistor, however, is facing serious scaling limitations. One path to extend the scalability is to replace the floating gate by a charge trapping material. Moreover, the combination of charge trapping with a localized channel hot electron injection mechanism allows to store two physically separated bits in one memory cell. Floating gate as well as charge trapping memory concepts both suffer from severe performance limitations with respect to write and erase speed and endurance calling for a significant system overhead. A memory that works like a random access memory and is nonvolatile would simplify system design. This, however, calls for new switching effects that are based on integrating new materials into the memory cell. In this talk first the material innovations currently under investigation to extend the scalability of floating gate devices will be discussed. Then the current status and the prospects of charge trapping devices will be reviewed, demonstrating their superior scalability. Finally an outlook to memory concepts that use, ferroelectric switching, magnetic switching, phase change or other resistive switching effects will be given to illustrate how the integration of new materials may solve the limitations of today’s semiconductor memory concepts.