Date of Award
5-1-2015
Degree Name
Master of Science
Department
Electrical and Computer Engineering
First Advisor
Haniotakis, Themistoklis
Abstract
Nowadays, researchers are trying to shrink the memory cell in order to increase the capacity of the memory system and reduce the hardware costs. In recent years, there has been a revolution in electronics by using fundamentals of physics to build a new memory for computer application in order to increase the capacity and decrease the power consumption. Increasing the capacity of the memory causes a growth in the chip area. From 1971 to 2012 semiconductor manufacturing process improved from 6µm to 22 µm. In May 2008, S.Williams stated that "it is time to stop shrinking". In his paper, he declared that the process of shrinking memory element has recently become very slow and it is time to use another alternative in order to create memory elements [9]. In this project, we present a new design of a memory array using the new element named Memristor [3]. Memristor is a two-terminal passive electrical element that relates the charge and magnetic flux to each other. The device remained unknown since 1971 when it was discovered by Chua and introduced as the fourth fundamental passive element like capacitor, inductor and resistor [3]. Memristor has a dynamic resistance and it can retain its previous value even after disconnecting the power supply. Due to this interesting behavior of the Memristor, it can be a good replacement for all of the Non-Volatile Memories (NVMs) in the near future. Combination of this newly introduced element with the nanowire crossbar architecture would be a great structure which is called Crossbar Memristor. Some frameworks have recently been introduced in literature that utilized Memristor crossbar array, but there are many challenges to implement the Memristor crossbar array due to fabrication and device limitations. In this work, we proposed a simple design of Memristor crossbar array architecture which uses input feedback in order to preserve its data after each read operation
Access
This thesis is Open Access and may be downloaded by anyone.