FRAM

ABSTRACT

Ferroelectric memory is a new type of semiconductor memory, which exhibit short programming time, low power consumption and nonvolatile memory, making highly suitable for application like contact less smart card, digital cameras which demands many memory write operations.

A ferroelectric memory technology consists of a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology with added layers on top for ferroelectric capacitors. A ferroelectric memory cell has at least one ferroelectric capacitor to store the binary data, and one transistor that provide access to the capacitor or amplify its content for a read operation. Once a cell is accessed for a read operation, its data are presented in the form of an analog signal to a sense amplifier, where they are compared against a reference voltage to determine their logic level.

Ferroelectric memories have borrowed many circuit techniques (such as folded-bitline architecture) from DRAM’s due to similarities of their cells and DRAM’s maturity. Some architectures are reviewed here.