Phase change materials in non-volatile storage

Over the last several decades, processors have improved much faster than storage components(1). Memory has therefore become the most frequent limiting factor of a system's performance, while the celebrated convergence of consumer, computer, and communication electronics has exponentially increased the need for increased memory size. In the future, additional issues will arise as a multitude of heterogeneous systems will spread integrated intelligence to all manner of products. Pressure will certainly grow in cost and performance optimization, as well as flexibility and integration requirements. From this perspective, novel solutions provided by emerging memory technologies are expected to become essential to meet the cost, bandwidth, and power efficiency requirements of future memory systems.