Prospect of embedded non-volatile memory in the smart society

Abstract

Embedded Flash (eFlash) is widely accepted by various applications because of reducing overall costs of system development, production and inventory. Continuous evolution of eFlash such as the split-gate charge-trapping memory has satisfied the most stringent quality requirement for automotive applications. Smart society for offering a better quality of life would diversify NV memory until the establishment of emerging memories. Add-on type eFlash with a few additional masks would replace the stand-alone data flash for adaptive tuning and security over the network. Towards the possible convergence of NV-memory in smart society, emerging memories such as ReRAM and STT-MRAM are progressing. Excellent features of smaller rewrite energy with the extending rewrite cycles could contribute to the outstanding energy saving such as normally-off systems.