Emerging nonvolatile memory (NVM) technologies

Significant progress has been made recently in emerging nonvolatile memories (NVMs). This paper will discuss advantages and challenges of several promising NVM devices, as well as their potential applications. Changing market trends toward mobile, IoT, and data-centric applications create new opportunities for NVMs. High-performance NVMs may enable novel architectures and designs, e.g., more uniform memory hierarchy, co-located logic and memory, and fine-grained power gating. Storage-class memories based on high-density NVMs could fill the performance and density gap between memory and storage. Some unique characteristics of emerging NVMs can be utilized to extend their applications beyond memory space, e.g., synaptic functions, security elements, etc.