Future prospects of DRAM: emerging alternatives

DRAM has been the dominant memory for today's computing memory systems due to its high data rate up to 1,866 Mbps. Researchers and developers of DRAM have been striving to improve the performance in terms of higher speed and higher density with lower bit cost. The conventional method of reducing the cost is to scale down. However, scaling-down is becoming a very difficult process because the scale has already reached a 20 nm node which has been recently developed by Samsung. As it becomes difficult to scale down, it becomes harder to have a higher density and yield, and of course, the cost cannot be reduced. Therefore, various memories have been studied and developed as potential candidates for the next generation DRAM. In this paper, we investigate the technical limitations that conventional DRAM needs to overcome, especially in terms of scaling-down. Then, we discuss the emerging memories that can be used as alternatives to DRAM and we point out what advantages they have.

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