ReRAM gets closer to reality

Resistive memory, swings both ways

Researchers from Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SEO:005930) and the department of physics at Sejong University have manged to develop a resistive memory architecture that allows rewrites more than 1 trillion times thereby allowing it to function as a potential replacement for both DRAM and NAND flash.

The passive switching memory is made using asymmetric Ta2O5-x/TaO2-x bilayer structures and has 10ns switching times, according to the authors of the paper published in Nature Materials.

The circuit is still only at an experimental stage and the dimensions are not close to what is required for mass production, but this may soon change, since IMEC has announced the discovery of a new filament that allows aggressive scaling of resistive RAM. IMEC performs research in nano-electronics and counts Intel, Samsung, Panasonic, NVIDIA, STMicroelectronics, NXP Semiconductors, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, TSMC, Hynix, ASML, Xilinx, Altera, Cadence Design Systems, Qualcomm, Renesas, Siltronic among its members.

The filament allows resistive RAM to scale to much smaller dimensions than is currently possible for DRAM and NAND flash that currently has a limit around 15nm. Below this the cells that have so far been manufactured on an experimental basis become unstable resulting in random bit errors that are not easily correctable.S|A

Updated: typo fixed thanks to the commenter below and the forum member who reported the comment.

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