Tutorial: Basics of Non-Volatile Memories: MRAM, RRAM, and PRAM

“NAND Flash and eFlash have been the workhorse of memory hierarchy for standalone storage and embedded non-volatile memories (NVMs), respectively. But with the ever increasing need for memory capacity and and width, due to new applications in graphics, AI and IoT, device and circuit designers have been heavily investigating alternative memories to fill the need. When it comes storage, there is a big gap between DRAM and NAND in terms of density and speed, which could justify a new memory type. When it comes to NVM, growing IoT requires better performance and more power efficient NVM than eFlash, which can be scaled to 1xnm technologies. This tutorial will talk about the basic characteristics, circuits and system designs for emerging non-volatile memories such as MRAM, RRAM, and PRAM. The tutorial will present the details of MRAM and RRAM, as well as a omparison of these memory devices, and the applications they target. After finishing the Ph.D. in EE at the University of Virginia in 2002, Fatih joined Logic Tech. Development at Intel. Since then, he has been working on memory developments, such as SRAM, DRAM, MRAM and RRAM. He has served as technical committee member at VLSI Symp. Circuits and ISSCC. He has co-authored more than 40 papers and he's co-inventor of more than 30 patents.”