NAND Flash Innovations and Future Scaling

Abstract

Since its first appearance in 1987, NAND flash memory technologies have been successfully developed for nearly 4 decades. A tremendous amount of innovation has been made in material, process, device and design technologies. 2D NAND cell technology has been scaled from 1µm to ~15nm. 3D NAND scaling has reached ~300 layer stacking. Multi-level-cell technology has achieved the 4 bits-per-cell in production. Taken together, NAND technology has achieved more than a million-fold increase in areal bit density over the past 37 years. Various technology proposals have been made for the next scaling paradigm to overcome the scaling challenges of layer stacking and continue NAND cell scaling.

Topics & Concepts