Trends and Challenges of Large Scale Embedded Memories
Tohru Fmyama · 2004
Embedded memories are increasingly becoming more important components for SoC’s (System on a Chip) as the silicon technology advances and SoC’s get more complex. In addition, diverging SoC applications require wide range of different performance and specification for embedded memories; from very high bandwidth to ultra low power consumption. This paper outlooks the trend in large scale (capacity) embedded memories and some of the challenges to meet the wide spread requirements. I. Introduction As scaling has advanced, silicon technology has become able to fabricate very small geometry patterns, such as 90 nm and/or 65 nm. This progress now provides the capability to integrate very complicated systems on a single silicon chip; video-audio processing rich digital consumer systems, battery operated low power mobile application systems, and so forth. These integrated systems typically consist of some processing unit(s), busses, memories and interfaces. Complex processing of massive data must be handled and executed in a very short period of time, in other words, with a very high system clock frequency. This necessitates higher performance, lower power consumption and larger capacity embedded memories. Fig. 1 shows the dramatically increasing trend of embedded memory areas amongst the building components in SoC’s. Embedded memories are becoming more important because they more directly determine the competitiveness of SoC’s.