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Electronics

Inside story of ferroelectric memories

Nature volume 483, pages 279–280 (2012)Cite this article

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The drive to improve digital memory through ever-shrinking electronic circuitry will ultimately face a bottleneck. Researchers propose exploiting the room 'inside' memory elements as a solution.

The amount of stored information in the world is reaching an astronomical1 5×1021 bits — roughly one million times the number of cereal grains produced on Earth in a year2. And the number of bits doubles every three years1. This has motivated efforts to produce improved digital memory solutions that have better reliability, lower power consumption, lower cost and, crucially, higher storage density. Writing in Advanced Materials, Lee et al.3 propose a method to increase the storage density of an existing class of commercial memory. The technique involves controlling the physical process through which information is written in memory cells — the building blocks of data-storage devices — instead of the usual approach of reducing the cells' size.

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Figure 1: Binary and multilevel data storage.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Vincent Garcia and Manuel Bibes are at Unité Mixte de Physique CNRS/Thales, Campus de l'Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau 91767, France.,

    Vincent Garcia & Manuel Bibes

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  1. Vincent Garcia
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  2. Manuel Bibes
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Correspondence to Vincent Garcia or Manuel Bibes.

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Garcia, V., Bibes, M. Inside story of ferroelectric memories. Nature 483, 279–280 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/483279a

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