Challenges of Flash Memory for Next Decade

It was more than 50 years ago, the first floating gate MOS transistor was proposed and 30 years has passed after the first NAND flash memory was commercialized. The NAND flash memory kept increasing its capacity by introducing new technology with dimensional scaling. In the past, the market was mainly driven by consumer electronics, but in today's information explosion, data center, automobiles and industrial equipment are growing markets and reliability is very important. There is a trade-off between improving reliability and reducing manufacturing cost. Since capacity expansion continues, how to realize both reliability and cost requirement under the complex manufacturing process has been a major issue. It becomes increasingly important to improve the reliability not only by memory device itself but also from the entire system point of view.