New Materials Enhance Memory Performance

摘要

Memory cell capacitance has been enhanced in several ways as feature sizes have decreased: hemispherical polysilicon and deep trenches for area enlargement, and silicon nitride to increase the dielectric constant. Upcoming generations will require dielectric materials with higher k values, and novel barrier and electrode materials will have to be developed with them. In addition, ferroelectric materi-als provide a way to store a polarization, and magnetic memory technologies promise a non-volatile memory with fast access times.