Performance-based comparative study of existing and emerging non-volatile memories: a review

The need for high-density, higher-speed memory devices has increased tremendously over the last decade. With scaling and integration capacity of traditional memories reaching its limits, new types of memory technologies have come up in the semiconductor market. These new technologies, i.e. non-volatile memories, aim to solve traditional charge-based memory limitations like low dynamic power, higher BW performance, high density and low scaling cost and also aim to solve low-endurance, process issues. Non-volatile memories play an essential role in transforming the semiconductor industry for future use. This paper aims to describe characteristics of different types of non-volatile memories, 'available' and 'emerging', in the semiconductor industry. Some recent developments are covered as a part of study in the application of all-optical-enabled MTJ, spin-polarized currents, phase conversion and magnetism in the logic and memory domain. In addition, characteristics of different emerging memories such as all-optical switching MTJ, ReRAM, PCM, SOT-MRAM, STT-MRAM, etc. have been discussed on basis of various performance parameters. Non-volatile memories mentioned above not only provides retention period of over 10 years but also ensures endurance over similar to 10(10) cycles. The read and write operation latency in these memories is between 1 and 7 ns range which is much better as compared to charge-based memories. The literature comparison analysis along with experimental results summary has been presented in this paper.