Nonvolatile Memory Design

VLSI-Design for Non-Volatile Memories is intended for electrical engineers and graduate students who want to enter into the integrated circuit design world. Non-volatile memories are treated as an example to explain general design concepts. Practical illustrative examples of non-volatile memories, including flash types, are showcased to give insightful examples of the discussed design approaches. A collection of photos is included to make the reader familiar with silicon aspects. Throughout all parts of this book, the authors have taken a practical and applications-driven point of view, providing a comprehensive and easily understood approach to all the concepts discussed. Giovanni Campardo and Rino Micheloni have a solid track record of leading design activities at the STMicroelectronics Flash Division. David Novosel is President and founder of Intelligent Micro Design, Inc., Pittsburg, PA.

The manufacture of flash memory, which is the dominant nonvolatile memory technology, is facing severe technical barriers. So much so, that some emerging technologies have been proposed as alternatives to flash memory in the nano-regime. Nonvolatile Memory Design: Magnetic, Resistive, and Phase Changing introduces three promising candidates: phase-change memory, magnetic random access memory, and resistive random access memory. The text illustrates the fundamental storage mechanism of these technologies and examines their differences from flash memory techniques. Based on the latest advances, the authors discuss key design methodologies as well as the various functions and capabilities of the three nonvolatile memory technologies.

The manufacture of flash memory, which is the dominant nonvolatile memory technology, is facing severe technical barriers. So much so, that some emerging technologies have been proposed as alternatives to flash memory in the nano-regime. Nonvolatile Memory Design: Magnetic, Resistive, and Phase Changing introduces three promising candidates: phase-change memory, magnetic random access memory, and resistive random access memory. The text illustrates the fundamental storage mechanism of these technologies and examines their differences from flash memory techniques. Based on the latest advances, the authors discuss key design methodologies as well as the various functions and capabilities of the three nonvolatile memory technologies.

This book presents the latest techniques for characterization, modeling and design for nano-scale non-volatile memory (NVM) devices. Coverage focuses on fundamental NVM device fabrication and characterization, internal state identification of memristic dynamics with physics modeling, NVM circuit design and hybrid NVM memory system design-space optimization. The authors discuss design methodologies for nano-scale NVM devices from a circuits/systems perspective, including the general foundations for the fundamental memristic dynamics in NVM devices. Coverage includes physical modeling, as well as the development of a platform to explore novel hybrid CMOS and NVM circuit and system design. • Offers readers a systematic and comprehensive treatment of emerging nano-scale non-volatile memory (NVM) devices; • Focuses on the internal state of NVM memristic dynamics, novel NVM readout and memory cell circuit design and hybrid NVM memory system optimization; • Provides both theoretical analysis and practical examples to illustrate design methodologies; • Illustrates design and analysis for recent developments in spin-toque-transfer, domain-wall racetrack and memristors.

Presented here is an all-inclusive treatment of Flash technology, including Flash memory chips, Flash embedded in logic, binary cell Flash, and multilevel cell Flash. The book begins with a tutorial of elementary concepts to orient readers who are less familiar with the subject. Next, it covers all aspects and variations of Flash technology at a mature engineering level: basic device structures, principles of operation, related process technologies, circuit design, overall design tradeoffs, device testing, reliability, and applications.

This book explores the design implications of emerging, non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies on future computer memory hierarchy architecture designs. Since NVM technologies combine the speed of SRAM, the density of DRAM, and the non-volatility of Flash memory, they are very attractive as the basis for future universal memories. This book provides a holistic perspective on the topic, covering modeling, design, architecture and applications. The practical information included in this book will enable designers to exploit emerging memory technologies to improve significantly the performance/power/reliability of future, mainstream integrated circuits.

Memory Design Techniques for Low Energy Embedded Systems centers one of the most outstanding problems in chip design for embedded application. It guides the reader through different memory organizations and technologies and it reviews the most successful strategies for optimizing them in the power and performance plane.

This book explores the implications of non-volatile memory (NVM) for database management systems (DBMSs). The advent of NVM will fundamentally change the dichotomy between volatile memory and durable storage in DBMSs. These new NVM devices are almost as fast as volatile memory, but all writes to them are persistent even after power loss. Existing DBMSs are unable to take full advantage of this technology because their internal architectures are predicated on the assumption that memory is volatile. With NVM, many of the components of legacy DBMSs are unnecessary and will degrade the performance of data-intensive applications. We present the design and implementation of DBMS architectures that are explicitly tailored for NVM. The book focuses on three aspects of a DBMS: (1) logging and recovery, (2) storage and buffer management, and (3) indexing. First, we present a logging and recovery protocol that enables the DBMS to support near-instantaneous recovery. Second, we propose a storage engine architecture and buffer management policy that leverages the durability and byte-addressability properties of NVM to reduce data duplication and data migration. Third, the book presents the design of a range index tailored for NVM that is latch-free yet simple to implement. All together, the work described in this book illustrates that rethinking the fundamental algorithms and data structures employed in a DBMS for NVM improves performance and availability, reduces operational cost, and simplifies software development.