A 40nm Low-Power Logic Compatible Phase Change Memory Technology
An embedded phase change memory technology in 40nm low-power logic platform is demonstrated with minimal added process complexity - two non-critical additional masks over standard logic. Specially designed hard mask and etching process was used to achieve 50% shrinkage of the memory cell bottom electrode dimension with same lithography tooling as the 40nm logic platform. Bottom electrode CD shrinkage along with optimization of the electrode materials in terms of electrical and thermal conductivity enabled significant (~4x) write current reduction attaining competitive levels of ~300 A at 40nm BE CD. Embedded PCM cells reported in this work demonstrated over 100x memory window - (RESET/SET resistance switching ratio), over 200k cycling endurance with extrapolated 10 year retention at 120 . In this work not only large switching resistance ratios but also highly-controllable resistance values that are almost independent of the PCM starting resistance state are presented along with the corresponding programing pulse requirements. The switching resistance ratio and resistance value controllability are key features for neural network and compute-in-memory applications. In this work, their benefits on design margins for energy efficient high-density binary neural network for inference applications aiming accuracy levels of well over 90% is asserted over an MNIST dataset. authors: Wu, J.Y., Chen, Y.S., Khwa, W.S., Yu, S.M., Wang, T.Y., Tseng, J.C., Chih, Y.D., Diaz, C.H.
Memory
Memory
Data is the most valuable resource in today’s digital economy. Currently over 2.5 quintillion (1018) bytes of data are generated daily and the pace is accelerating. More data than ever needs to be processed. Memory plays a key role in the flow of data. The gap between logic and memory is a bottle neck to system performance. To optimize the trade-off between cost and performance, a hierarchical memory system has been adopted. At the top of the hierarchy are static random access memories (SRAM) and dynamic random access memory (DRAM), both inherently volatile. SRAM is integrated right on the logic chips as cache memory to provide fastest access. DRAM is physically smaller than SRAM and consequently supports higher capacity. DRAM is generally an off-chip memory solution and ~10x slower than SRAM due to the need for constant refresh. Non-volatile memories (NVM) such as Flash are next in the hierarchy providing much higher memory capacity and density while also preserving information in the absence of power.
Recent new technologies are emerging rapidly to bring processing tasks near to or inside the memory to improve computing efficiency and enable new functionalities. Emerging NVMs use new types of materials and mechanisms to store data. They are promising for blending the memory hierarchy to boost the overall performance. Furthermore, their unique characteristics offer great potential to enable new applications (e.g. neuromorphic computing) and novel architectures (e.g. 3D integration).
TSMC’s non-volatile memory solutions include Flash, Spin-transfer torque magnetic random access memory (STT-MRAM), and resistive random access memory (RRAM). TSMC is also actively exploring phase change random access memory (PCRAM), and spin-orbit torque MRAM (SOT-MRAM) elements, as well as selector devices which are essential to support higher density cross-point array architectures.
