A 20nm 1.8V 8Gb PRAM (PCM) with 40MB/s Program Bandwidth

jiaoxin12366

Phase-change random access memory (PRAM) is considered as one of the most
promising candidates for future memories because of its good scalability and
cost-effectiveness [1]. Besides implementations with standard interfaces like
NOR flash or LPDDR2-NVM, application-oriented approaches using PRAM as
main-memory or storage-class memory have been researched [2-3]. These
studies suggest that noticeable merits can be achieved by using PRAM in
improving power consumption, system cost, etc. However, relatively low chip
density and insufficient write bandwidth of PRAMs are obstacles to better system
performance. In this paper, we present an 8Gb PRAM with 40MB/s write
bandwidth featuring 8Mb sub-array core architecture with 20nm diode-switched
PRAM cells [4]. When an external high voltage is applied, the write bandwidth
can be extended as high as 133MB/s.