During IDEM, which is held in Washington, D.C. this week, the European research institute IMEC has shown the first 10nm RRAM cell. RRAM is often also referred to as a memristor.
The area of the cell is 100nm² and is based on hafnium/hafnium-oxide as the switching material. This material is placed between conventional contacts in a cross bar array. The contacts are made of titanium-nitride.
Cross section of IMEC 10nm RRAM cell. Copyright IMEC.
The cell has demonstrated an endurance of more than 1 billion reads/writes and switches in about 1ns. IMEC has extrapolated the data retention period to 10 years at 100 degrees C. Excellent life-span next to a hot GPU.
If manufacturing hurdles can be overcome, then this cell clearly demonstrates that RRAM will be superior to both NAND flash as well as conventional DRAM.
In order to use its potential fully then programmers will start to think of different ways to write programs since memory and storage over time could merge to one large linear space.S|A
Mads Ølholm
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