Non-volatile memory technologies for beyond 2010

The development of Flash memory technology over the past decade has been one of the driving forces behind the tremendous growth in digital consumer applications, such as digital cameras, handheld music players and mobile phones. NAND Flash has been leading the way from 16Mb in 1994 to 4Gb today. This paper discusses the impact of continuous advances in NAND Flash technology on consumer applications and also reviews technical challenges to the further scaling of NAND and NOR Flash memories, while considering the possibility of other nonvolatile memory technologies for high density nonvolatile data storage beyond 2010.