The level of innovation in companies throughout the supply chain has increased significantly in the past few months. Engineers are now turning their attention away from marginal improvements that were designed to keep products coming out in the pipeline to more long-term achievements that can bring a new paradigm to the market.

Many end equipment manufacturers look to chip manufacturers for the basic technological leaps that will enable the next generation of products. This series of articles will look at three significant trends emerging in one of the most critical and competitive sockets in modern electronic systems, including: nonvolatilve memory, hyperintegration and new packaging approaches. First we'll look at non-volatile memory.

What is "non-volatile memory?
In short, it's memory that does not require power in order to retain stored data. In the past decade, the market for this capability has been limited to a few applications, mostly in automotive, smartcard, medical and space applications, and companies have been willing to pay a premium because the fabrication processes have not been efficient or cheap.

However, there are larger emerging trends like energy harvesting, mesh networked wireless sensors, building automation and security, product durability, and deeply embedded applications (where manual maintenance would be near impossible) driving many existing and new end equipments to require memory with low power, high endurance and radiation resistance.

With existing memory technologies in the embedded processing/SOC market, there are two persistent problems. First, the processor speed, efficiency and size have outpaced the available memory technology, thus forcing designers to implement complicated modules in the architecture and workarounds in the hardware. Second, many processors today run at a very low voltage (1-3V), yet

Flash-based memory (most common memory used today) needs more than 10V to write to memory. This pains engineers as they have to design in large charge pump architectures that are costly in terms of the space on the die, which in turn increases costs of the chip.

As shown in Figure 1, below, several different technologies have emerged, including, Phase Change Memory, Magnetoresistive RAM, Ferroelectric RAM and SONOS Flash, and the next few years will determine which will be successful and which will fail. Each type has its pros and cons, and they are all one small step away from an explosion of market acceptance in the embedded market.

Figure 1. Overview of Nonvolatile Memory Types