Review and Outlook on Embedded NVM Technologies – From Evolution to Revolution

Embedded non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies are key enablers of today’s wide variety of microcontroller (MCU) products. Since more than three decades floating gate and oxide/nitride charge storage based NVM concepts embedded into CMOS technologies are dominating the market and successfully allowed evolutionary chip performance, leakage, memory size and cost improvements while following the CMOS shrink roadmap. Although today we see advanced CMOS nodes getting shrunk down to 5nm and below, it is getting more and more complex and expensive to embed such classical NVM concepts into advanced CMOS nodes. Therefore since many years both academia and industry are strongly focusing on emerging NVM concepts like STT-MRAM, PCM, RRAM and others, allowing easier CMOS integration and lower process complexity, hoping that eventually an emerging successor NVM concept can cover the wide range of MCU application requirements. Although these concepts use fundamentally different physical working principles, today several of these new concepts are at the verge of being introduced to the market replacing traditional NVM concepts. This paper gives an overview on the current situation and application specific outlook.