Symposium Q, 'New Functional Materials and Emerging Device Architectures for Nonvolatile Memories', held April 25−29 at the 2011 MRS Spring Meeting in San Francisco, California, was a follow up of a previous series of related symposia on nonvolatile memories at MRS annual meetings. The high attendance and large number of papers submitted indicate continuing strong international interest and research efforts in the field of emerging new nonvolatile memory materials. Main areas of research featured in this symposium were advanced flash memories, phase change memories and resistive switching memories. In addition, ferroelectric memories, organic memories and new emerging memories remained of interest. With international contributions from universities, research centers and industry, this volume reflects the recent advances in material science and their influence on the memory technologies addressed in this symposium.
Nonvolatile memories are becoming an increasingly important electronic component, due to the ever-increasing need for data storage in multimedia and other mobile applications where electronic components are replacing magnetic hard drives. Today, Flash is the main nonvolatile memory technology, but further scaling of this technology will likely be restricted by important physical and material limitations. This explains recent increased research on new concepts for nonvolatile memories, for which new developments in materials science and technology, the focus of this book, are key. Chapters include Advanced Flash Memory which deals with solutions for scaled Flash memory, including the use of new high-k layers and nanocrystals. Resistive switching concepts are discussed in the Oxide Resistive Switching Memory and Organic Resistive Switching Memory chapters. More research on polymer memories are detailed in Nanoparticle-Based Organic Memory and Organic Ferroelectric Memory. Two chapters de
The 61 papers report on recent developments in such aspects as integrated ferroelectric and high-permitivity device technology, particularly high-density FeRAM devices; the use of such films in piezoe
