Flash memory and beyond

Flash memories have been the fastest growing among the different semiconductor memory families; their market has reached a size comparable to the DRAM one and it is expected to keep growing in the coming years. The fantastic success of flash memory is related to the key role they play as storing media for both code and data in battery-supplied electronic systems. Moreover the diffusion of multimedia consumer products will drive the increasing demand of flash memory cards. NOR and NAND flash technologies continue to dominate in their respective field for at least five more years, following the lithography scaling for two or three generation beyond the 90nm node, before facing severe scaling limitation. PCM is the best candidate, among the different emerging memory concepts, to take by that time the baton and to lead the non-volatile memory technology race down to the 20nm frontier.