The Future of Embedded Flash
March 15, 2010
By Lee Cleveland
Differentiation and time-to-market have always been the cornerstones of success for chip companies. Embedded Flash has played an important role in enabling competitive products by providing flexibility and a higher level of integration to the system-on-chip (SOC). At 90nm and above, embedded Flash is prevalent in many applications, ranging from code storage in power window controllers to secure key storage in smartcards. But at 65nm and below, there is currently no viable embedded Flash solution available. A solution will be needed as products migrate to more advanced process geometries in the next few years. In this article, possible non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies to enable embedded Flash at 65nm and below will be explored, including magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM), silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon (SONOS), resistive random access memory (RRAM) and antifuse.