ABSTRACT
The route to progress in memory technology is cost reduction and the development of ever faster, more compact, and less power consuming memory systems, with greater and greater storage capacity. Since all of these benefits can be obtained by reducing the size of the basic storage cell, it is natural to suppose that nanotechnology will eventually play a fundamental role. However, the system must also include a means for writing and reading the cells efficiently, and this turns out to be the most demanding aspect of memory design. For example, very compact memories based on scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and related technologies, which employ storage cells approaching the size of a single atom, have been proposed, but the difficulty of designing sufficiently fast and reliable read/write mechanisms will be exceedingly formidable.
