Non-volatile memory technologies: The quest for ever lower cost

Growth of flash memory business over last 20 years was driven by never ending reduction of memory cost through Moore's Law and innovations, and the quest for ever lower cost will continue for many years to come. This review begins with a brief summary of trend of flash memory cost reduction up to now. Then some of the improvement efforts on existing technologies reported by industry will be discussed. NAND flash will continue to be the cost reduction driver in next few years but will face increasing level of difficulties. Innovations will enable the trend to continue. For longer term, industry is developing new memory technologies that have promise to deliver ever lower cost. Some more mature new technology concepts will be discussed in this review. General direction is to go to multi-layer memories with multi-level cell capabilities. There are also alternative approaches like probe based storage. Enhancement from system level solution will help existing technologies as well as facilitating introduction of new technologies. It is expected that products from few new technologies will take off in coming years to enable continuation of cost reduction of non-volatile memories, meeting insatiable demand of existing devices for more memory capacity at lower cost, as well as creating new devices and new markets.