Month: August 2013

Samsung’s View on Charge Trap Flash

Samsung's Cheese analogy for Charge Trap FlashAt the Flash Memory Summit yesterday ES Jung, PhD, EVP & GM for the Samsung R&D Center, explained the inner workings of Samsung’s new V-NAND vertical NAND flash technology.  I will shortly be writing a series to explain what a 3D NAND is since there is little on the web that gives clear details about the technology.

One key attribute of most 3D NAND approaches is the use of a charge trapping layer.  This has to do with the difficulty of manufacturing sideways floating gates.

Dr Jung delighted the show’s audience by explaining that a standard floating gate is like Continue reading “Samsung’s View on Charge Trap Flash”

Samsung Announces 3D NAND Production

Toshiba's BiCS 3D NAND 2007 diagramSamsung has announced production of its 3D NAND technology.  This approach, first introduced by Toshiba in 2007, allows NAND flash makers to achieve more bits per chip by building NAND strings, which normally run across the surface of the chip, as vertical stacks.

It’s a fascinating technology, since it harnesses exotic steps invented by DRAM makers in the 1990s to get over scaling problems in that technology.  At the time DRAM had to go vertical to follow Moore’s Law and there were two schools of vertical DRAM: Stacked Capacitor, and Trench Cell.  The stacked capacitor camp layered polysilicon and silicon dioxide into layers to form a vertical capacitor.  The trench camp etched a very narrow and deep hole into the silicon and lined it with the capacitor plates.  Both worked very well, but over time the trench makers have Continue reading “Samsung Announces 3D NAND Production”

Crossbar’s Radical New Memory Technology

Cross Section of the Crossbar Memory CellCrossbar, Inc. has come out of stealth mode with a fascinating new alternative memory technology.  Furthermore, the company says that a working memory array has been produced at a commercial fab.

Crossbar says that the technology can put a terabyte onto a single chip.  The company has already measured filaments as thin as 6nm, and is confident that it can be shrunk further and that it will support multilevel cells.

Crossbar’s device is a silver filament ReRAM with a difference.  For one, the silver filaments are in standard silicon dioxide, probably the most Continue reading “Crossbar’s Radical New Memory Technology”