Fundamental scaling laws of DRAM dielectrics

Dynamic random access memories (DRAM) demand an ever increasing density of storage capacitors. We show that increasing the dielectric constant K of the capacitor dielectric will not help to meet future requirements. This is because the amount of charge stored on a given area has an upper physical limit. In fact if the scaling of DRAM feature sizes and supply voltages will follow the SIA roadmap, a maximum K-value of 500 to 1000 must not be exceeded for future DRAM generations.