1. Emerging Non-volatile Memories: Opportunities and Challenges
Shahar Kvatinsky
Department of Electrical Engineering
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
November 11, 2015

2. The Problem with NAND Flash
Source: D. Ruggeri, MICRON
Flash memory 1x
3D NAND today. Going back in technology.

3. Going 3D
Company
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
21nm
19nm
16-19nm V-NAND (24 layers)
12nm V-NAND (32L)
12nm V-NAND (48L)
20nm
16nm
3D NAND
3D NAND Gen. 2
15nm
3D NAND BiCS
Toshiba’s BiCS (Bit Cost Scalable) 3D NAND
"Technology Roadmap for NAND Flash Memory". techinsights. April Retrieved 9 January 2015.

4. Motivation for New Technologies
Scalability of 3D
Volatile technologies:
Energy (leakage, refresh in DRAM)
Limited density and scalability
Chip energy
Toshiba’s BiCS (Bit Cost Scalable) 3D NAND
"Technology Roadmap for NAND Flash Memory". techinsights. April Retrieved 9 January 2015.
Source: E. Esteve, IPNEST

5. Emerging Nonvolatile Memory Technologies
RRAM
PCM
STT MRAM
CBRAM
There is a need for new memory technologies – large interest – we will call all of them as memristors.

6. Resistive RAM (RRAM, ReRAM)
Lim, E.W.; Ismail, R. Conduction Mechanism of Valence Change Resistive Switching Memory: A Survey. Electronics 2015, 4,

7. RRAM Status
Product:
Prototypes: 24nm 2-layer 32Gb (ISSCC 2013) 40us read, 230us write
Research/development:
There is a need for new memory technologies – large interest – we will call all of them as memristors.

8. Conductive Bridging RAM (CBRAM, PMC)
Nanotechnology and Nanomaterials » "New Progress on Graphene Research", book edited by Jian Ru Gong, chapter 7
Low voltage/power

9. CBRAM Status Products:
Prototypes: 27nm 16Gb (ISSCC 2014) 2us read, 10us write, 1T1R, 6F2
Research/development:
There is a need for new memory technologies – large interest – we will call all of them as memristors.

10. Phase Change Memory (PCM, PCRAM, PRAM)
There is a need for new memory technologies – large interest – we will call all of them as memristors.

11. PCM Status Products: Prototypes: Research/development:
20nm, 8 Gb, 2012
45nm, 1 Gb,
There is a need for new memory technologies – large interest – we will call all of them as memristors.

12. Spin-Torque Transfer Magnetoresistance RAM (STT MRAM)

13. STT MRAM Status Products: Prototypes: Research/development:
64Mb, DDR3, 400 MHz
1Mb, 45nm
32Mb
There is a need for new memory technologies – large interest – we will call all of them as memristors.

14. Shared Properties BEOL CMOS compatibility Resistive Nonvolatility
High endurance
Speed
Density
Low voltage
Retention
There is a need for new memory technologies – large interest – we will call all of them as memristors.

15. Challenges Selectors Device variations Yield Power Endurance
There is a need for new memory technologies – large interest – we will call all of them as memristors.
Source: Crossbar, IEDM 2014

16. Immediate Applications
NAND Flash replacement
Storage Class Memory
Embedded NVM
There is a need for new memory technologies – large interest – we will call all of them as memristors.

17. On-Die Intensive Memory Circuits and Architectures
Multistate Register
Continuous Flow Multithreading

18. FPGA Source: P.-E. Gaillardon, EPFL
There is a need for new memory technologies – large interest – we will call all of them as memristors.
Source: P.-E. Gaillardon, EPFL

19. Integrating memristors with standard logic
Logic with Memristors
Memristor layer
CMOS
layer
Integrating memristors with standard logic
CMOS logic is good, so why bother with memristor logic?
First reason – if the memristor-based memory is there, we can do logic in the same price! We can break the conventional Von Neuman architecture to new architecture for calculation inside the memory. It can be done in parallel and in a dynamic manner.
Second reason – we can use memristor-based logic as a redundant logic layer for backup or fixing soft errors for example and to save die area – ECC, Die area, etc.
And the last reason – it is fun and interesting, after all I am in the academia…
Logic within memory
Beyond Moore
Beyond Von-Neumann

20. Neuromorphic Computing
This slide is for short presentations

21. Circuits Source: T. Prodromakis, University of Southampton
There is a need for new memory technologies – large interest – we will call all of them as memristors.
Source: T. Prodromakis, University of Southampton

22. Summary Need for new nonvolatile memory technology Challenges
Opportunities for novel applications:
Logic
Programmable circuits
Neuromorphic
On-die memory
There is a need for new memory technologies – large interest – we will call all of them as memristors.

23. Thanks!

24. Cost Random Access Time ns us ms s CPU Register CPU L1-3 Cache DRAM
SCM
SSD
Cost
HDD
Diameter ~log capacity ns us ms s
Random Access Time