Ovonic Unified Memory
Nowadays, digital memories are used in each and every fields of day-to-day life. Semiconductors form the fundamental building blocks of the modern electronic world providing the brains and the memory of products all around us from washing machines to super computers. But now we are entering an era of material limited scaling. Continuous scaling has required the introduction of new materials.
Current memory technologies have a lot of limitations. The new memory technologies have got all the good attributes for an ideal memory. Among them Ovonic Unified Memory (OUM) is the most promising one. OUM is a type of nonvolatile memory, which uses chalcogenide materials for storage of binary data. The term “chalcogen” refers to the Group VI elements of the periodic table. “Chalcogenide” refers to alloys containing at least one of these elements such as the alloy of germanium, antimony, and tellurium, which is used as the storage element in OUM. Electrical energy (heat) is used to convert the material between crystalline (conductive) and amorphous (resistive) phases and the resistive property of these phases is used to represent 0s and 1s.
To write data into the cell, the chalcogenide is heated past its melting point and then rapidly cooled to make it amorphous. To make it crystalline, it is heated to just below its melting point and held there for approximately 50ns, giving the atoms time to position themselves in their crystal locations. Once programmed, the memory state of the cell is determined by reading its resistance.
INTRODUCTION
We are now living in a world driven by various electronic equipments. Semiconductors form the fundamental building blocks of the modern electronic world providing the brains and the memory of products all around us from washing machines to super computers. Semi conductors consist of array of transistors with each transistor being a simple switch between electrical 0 and 1. Now often bundled together in there 10’s of millions they form highly complex, intelligent, reliable semiconductor chips, which are small and cheap enough for proliferation into products all around us.
Identification of new materials has been, and still is, the primary means in the development of next generation semiconductors. For the past 30 years, relentless scaling of CMOS IC technology to smaller dimensions has enabled the continual introduction of complex microelectronics system functions. However, this trend is not likely to continue indefinitely beyond the semiconductor technology roadmap. As silicon technology approaches its material limit, and as we reach the end of the roadmap, an understanding of emerging research devices will be of foremost importance in the identification of new materials to address the corresponding technological requirements.
If scaling is to continue to and below the 65nm node, alternatives to CMOS designs will be needed to provide a path to device scaling beyond the end of the roadmap. However, these emerging research technologies will be faced with an uphill technology challenge. For digital applications, these challenges include exponentially increasing the leakage current (gate, channel, and source/drain junctions), short channel effects, etc. while for analogue or RF applications, among the challenges are sustained linearity, low noise figure, power added efficiency and transistor matching. One of the fundamental approaches to manage this challenge is using new materials to build the next generation transistors.
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