Recent Advances in High Density Phase Change Memory (PRAM)

Phase-change Random Access Memory (PRAM) has drawn much attention as a promising candidate for the next generation nonvolatile memory. This is because PRAM has a great potential not only to provide adequate solutions for solving the scaling issues that other conventional nonvolatile memories might face in near future, but also to create new functions and applications of its own with its fast write programming speed and direct overwrite capability. As a result, PRAM has been the fastest evolutionary memory and it is close to commercialization. In this paper, recent progresses in PRAM technologies will be discussed and future direction will be proposed.