Future trend of flash memories

Flash memories have provided reliable solid-state storage solutions for over twenty years. In the last few years we have seen an explosive growth of NAND flash, fueled by digital camera, USB, MP3, iPhone and numerous new mobile applications. However, this phenomenal boom is silently threatened by scaling limitations intrinsically built into the flash devices. Old challenges such as scaling the charge tunneling oxide have remained unconquered (and now proven unconquerable) for nearly a decade, and new challenges such as floating gate cross talk become more serious with scaling. Will flash technology be simply a brief flash in the history of semiconductor? In this talk we will start with the flash memory technology and market trend. We will then discuss the scaling issues for NOR and NAND floating gate devices, and their fundamental limitations. Potential solutions, including both new devices and architecture and completely new types of non-volatile memory will then be discussed. Recent progresses in new NAND and NOR flash memory solutions or substitutes such as TANOS, BE-SONOS, 3D stacking and phase change memory will be examined in considerable details.