VOLATILE SEMICONDUCTOR MEMORY: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

The significant role and the great influence of microelectronic technology and industry on man’s life have become an indisputable fact. This industry, relying on nanotechnology and its remarkable evolutional and revolutionary progresses, benefits from huge number of innovations and inventions and is going to play a major role in all areas of electronics, computers, information technology, aerospace defense, and consumer goods in the 21st century with an increasing momentum. The current business of semiconductor industry is over $300 billion, one fifth of which belongs to semiconductor memory. Unfortunately our country has no share in such a huge global market. In this paper, after a brief review of different types of volatile semiconductor memories and their short history and origin, their applications, advantages, shortcomings and technological limits during the last decade and the solutions to them will be explained. Finally, the volatile semiconductor memory development trend in future (short-term and long-term) will be described.