DRAM technologies for today's market and future DRAM generations

Abstract

DRAM's have the highest production volume among all VLSI semiconductor products, and the DRAM market is one of the most competitive in the semiconductor industry. Maximizing the number of chips per wafer, improving the process yield, and simultaneously minimizing the process complexity and cost is mandatory for DRAM manufacturers. Traditionally, this demand for low-cost processes has caused DRAM transistor performance to lag that of high performance logic. Manufacturers try to meet the recent demand for higher DRAM performance mainly by DRAM architecture changes, but in future also an improved transistor performance may be needed. Emerging embedded applications require compatibility with complex logic processes in general. A short overview of trends will be given, and a DRAM technology will be demonstrated which meets both the requirements for today's competitive DRAMS and for future DRAM generations, including embedded applications.