Phase Change Memory development trends

At the beginning of this decade, in early 2000, few disruptive technologies had been proposed to replace the industry standard Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) technology and to enlarge the Flash application base. A widely accepted statement was that if any technology will succeed, it will materialize in the next decade. As the end of this decade is approaching it can be noted that only one of the proposed technologies is demonstrating the capability to enter the broad NVM market and to be a mainstream memory for the next decade: the Phase Change Memory technology. PCM provides a new set of features interesting for novel applications, combining features of NVM and DRAM and being at the same time a sustaining and a disruptive technology.