News

posted on 16 July 2008 19:49

Japanese scientiest have invented a form of flash memory that can be rewritten 100 million times or more and scaled down to a quarter or less of the size of NAND flash.

Ferroelectric flash uses ferroelectric gate field-effect transistors or FeFETs (pictured left) which can be programmed and erased 100 million times or more compared to current NAND flash cells with a 10,000 write/erase cycle duration. FeFETS also use 6 volts instead of the 20 needed by current flash memory. To complete a triumvirate of advantages FeFETs can theoretically be scaled down to a 10nm process size, way smaller than the 30nm minimum of NAND flash.

The research results were presented at the 23rd Nonvolatile Semiconductor Memory Workshop held in France, May 18–22, 2008. The prospect is of a candidate for high-capacity, high-density, NAND flash replacement.

FeFETS join other candidates such as MRAM (Magnetic RAM), STT-RAM (Spin Transfer Torque RAM) and PCM (Phase Change Memory). These have the speed of DRAM and it's not clear if FeNAND has DRAM speed characteristics.

More here.

[Chris Mellor.]