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Device physics

Memories are made of …

Nature volume 401, pages 658–659 (1999)Cite this article

For all the amazing advances that have been made in semiconductor technology, most notably in miniaturization and processor speed, some goals remain elusive. Among those goals is realizing the ‘ideal’ nonvolatile memory — memory that retains information when power is removed from the device, thereby precluding the need for battery back-up. On page 682 of this issue1, Park et al. describe how bismuth titanate incorporating lanthanum might be a good material for this purpose.

The problem being tackled here is that the common dynamic random access memory (DRAM), found in most computers, requires information stored in every bit to be rewritten several times per second. Some forms of nonvolatile memories are in current service (for example, for storing executable code in a processor), and they include so-called ‘EEPROM’ and ‘flash’ types which are based upon standard silicon processing. However, both suffer from disadvantages such as long write times, a limited number of write cycles and large size.

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References

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  1. the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, 27695-7919, North Carolina, USA

    Angus Kingon

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Correspondence to Angus Kingon.

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Kingon, A. Memories are made of …. Nature 401, 658–659 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/44307

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