IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Spring 2016 - 16

Dean Klein

O

ften taken for granted, solid-state
semiconductor memory is the enabler
of the contemporary digital world.
Today's memory chips pack billions of
transistors onto single slivers of silicon
and push the boundaries of both packaging and density. In
this article, we will look back on the history of memory, leading up to today's DRAM and NAND flash memory and ending
with a glimpse into the future of memories to come.

The Inextricability of Memory
From the earliest days of electronic computing, computer architecture and memory architecture have been
inextricably linked. Often, a new memory technology
was created for a specific computer implementation. Jay
Rajchman, inventor of the RCA Selectron tube memory,
has summed up the relationship up well:
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2016.2548422
Date of publication: 21 June 2016

The necessity of an inner memory in electronic
digital computers has been realized by all designers. The high computing speed possible with electronic devices becomes useful only when sufficient
intermediary results can be memorized rapidly to
allow the automatic handling of long sequences of
accurate computations which would be impractically lengthy by any other slower means. An ideal
inner memory organ for a digital computer should
be able to register in as short a writing time as possible any selected one of as many as possible on-
off signals and be able to deliver unequivocally the
result of this registration after an arbitrarily long
or short storing time with the smallest possible
delay following the reading call. [1]
Rajchman correctly identifies memory performance
as the enabler of high computing speed. This was true
in 1946, when Rajchman first made his observations,
and it remains true to this day; however, many factors
beyond mere performance now drive the development

From magnetic tape to NAND flash memory

The History of
Semiconductor Memory

16

S P R I N G 2 0 16

IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE

1943-0582/16©2016IEEE



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Spring 2016

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