Status and Perspectives of Embedded Non-Volatile Memories

Embedded Non Volatile Memories have been a key enabler for the growth of several microcontroller related product families in the last twenty years. Several kinds of memory cells have been proposed and put in production, differently from what has happened for stand-alone memory products. Focusing on applications requiring memory array sizes larger than hundreds of kbytes, in this paper we will review the most popular Non-Volatile memory cell architectures. Some of the various challenges that the technology scaling is going to face in the coming years will be analyzed as well, looking at the possible alternatives in terms of cell architectures as well as of process integration schemes. Within this frame, relatively novel cell concepts will be considered too, in light not only of their technical features, but also of their maturity and of some manufacturing constraints.