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Research, development, and commercialization of emerging non-volatile memories
(NVMs) are being aggressively pursued by the design community to supplement
and/or substitute conventional volatile and NV memory technologies that are facing
stiff scalability challenges. The emerging NVMs such as Magnetic RAM (MRAM),
Spin-Transfer Torque RAM (STTRAM), Resistive RAM (RRAM) and Phase
Change Memory (PCM) are already available in market as discreet chips. It has
been forecasted by Yole that the emerging NVM market will continue to grow and
find several niche applications in health care, banking, and day-to-day computing.
One of the key aspects of the functioning of these NVMs is sensing. Since the
emerging NVMs possess better reliability and faster access latency, they are
positioned to replace embedded higher-level memory such as cache, main memory,
and solid-state drives (SSDs). The well-known flash sensing techniques which are
latency-intensive are not suitable for emerging NVMs. The sensing techniques for
conventional charge-based memories such as SRAM and DRAM cannot be
extended to emerging NVMs since majority of these memories are resistive in
nature. The emerging NVMs face stiff sensing challenges due to process, voltage
and temperature variations, and low operating voltage requirements. The desire to
achieve high memory density places further restrictions on sense margin. Many
conflicting design trade-offs exist to maximize the sense margin at the cost of area,
power, and delay. A focused treatment on the sensing challenges associated with
emerging NVMs is required to accelerate their research and development efforts.
This is a first book which covers the sensing of emerging NVMs spanning
spintronic, resistive, phase-change, and ferroelectric memory technologies.
Challenges such as shrinking margin between resistive states due to intrinsic and
extrinsic sources of variations, noise and need for large memory capacity at tighter
footprint, lower operating voltages, and faster access latency are discussed in detail
in the context of sense amplifier design. Various state-of-the-art resilience
enhancement techniques are also presented. The book also investigates the impact
of application that poses new challenges and offers new opportunities for reliable
sensing.
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