Toshiba today announced the development of the world’s first MROM cell to offer improved cell current characteristics without any increase in cell size. This advance was achieved by adopting a multi-level-cell structure, which also secures high speed operation. MROM’s main role is to store the boot loader or firmware. The density of MROM implemented is SoC for such digital applications as smartphones and tablet PCs is increasing year by year, and in order to improve access time it is necessary to halve the MROM cell area with every generation.
Toshiba has developed a multi-bit cell that uses twice the area of a standard single level cell, successfully expanding channel width in the cell transistor by three times. This also triples the current characteristic of the cell without any change in the memory capacity per area. It reduces the influence of the variation in fabrication by 42%. Toshiba has developed of MROM cell with the 40nm process generation and aims to ship SoC for digital applications that implement the cell in 2014.
