Non-Volatile Nano-Electro-Mechanical Memory for Energy-Efficient Data Searching

A compact non-volatile nano-electro-mechanical memory (NV-NEMory) cell design together with a novel memory array architecture and operating scheme is proposed for real-time data searching applications. Performance characteristics of a vertically oriented NV-NEMory cell with a small layout area of 8F
²
, where F is the minimum half-pitch, are investigated by static and transient device simulations. Data searching can be achieved directly in the memory by a two-step read operation, dramatically improving the latency and energy cost of each search query.