IMEC Demonstrates 10nm RRAM Cell

At this year’s IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), IMEC has showcased a fully functional Resistive RAM (RRAM) cell measuring 10-nm by 10-nm, which the organization claims is the smallest such cell to be developed yet.

RRAM is one of the emerging technologies for nonvolatile memory to be researched by scientists and is believed to be a candidate for replacing NAND Flash technology in the scaling race to sub-10nm memories.

Current charge storage based Flash memory technologies are believed to face scaling limitations beyond 18nm.

RRAM is based on the electronic switching of a resistor element material between two stable (low/high) resistive states. The major strengths of RRAM technology are its potential density and speed.

The RRAM cell showcased by IMEC (Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre) has an area of less than 10x10nm (100 square nanometers) and has demonstrated an endurance of more than 10^9 (1 billion) cycles.

When developing its RRAM cell, IMEC has focused on using hafnium/hafnium-oxide as the switching material which is placed between conventional contacts in a cross bar array, as Semi Accurate reports. The contacts are made of titanium-nitride.

These results were obtained in cooperation with IMEC’s key partners in its core CMOS programs which include GlobalFoundries, Intel, Micron, Panasonic, Samsung, TSMC, Elpida, Hynix, Fujitsu and Sony.

IMEC hasn’t said when it expects these RRAM cells to enter into test production, or when it expects memory manufacturers to start using this type of memory.

In June of this year, an institute in Singapore also announced its plans to develop a RRAM prototype with a capacity of 16-kbit as well as controller chip for this kind of memory, but so far no other news regarding the progress of these prototypes was released.

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