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Ferroelectric RAM (FRAM) is a non-volatile solid-state data storage medium with low power consumption. It can be written electrically and is used in portable devices. The material used is lead zirconate titanate (PZT). FRAM has read-write access speeds 30,000 times faster than EEPROM and is a forerunner to racetrack memory, which is expected to be 100 times faster than FRAM.
Ferroelectric random access memory (FRAM or FeRAM) is a specialized type of solid-state data storage medium for computer applications. It differs from the common RAM used in most personal computers in that it is non-volatile, meaning that it retains the data stored in it when the device is powered off, not true of standard dynamic RAM (DRAM). The unique properties of the material from which the FRAM is made give it a natural ferroelectric state, which means that it has a built-in polarization that lends itself to semi-permanent storage of data without the need for power. This natural bias means that FRAM has a low level of power consumption compared to standard DRAM.
The data on a FRAM chip can also be changed by applying an electric field to write new information to it, which gives it some resemblance to Flash RAM and programmable memory chips in many types of industrial computer machines known as read-only memory electrically erasable programmable (EEPROM). The main disadvantages of FRAM are that the data storage density is significantly lower than that of other types of RAM and it is more difficult to manufacture, as the ferroelectric layer can be easily degraded during silicon chip manufacturing. Because ferroelectric RAM cannot hold a large amount of data and would be expensive to make for memory-intensive applications, it is often used in portable computer-based devices such as smart cards tied to security systems for entering buildings and radio frequency identifiers ( RFID) tags used on consumer products to track inventory.
The material most often used to produce ferroelectric RAM as of 2011 is lead zirconate titanate (PZT), although the history of the technology can be traced back to its conception in 1952 and first production in the late 1980s. The FRAM chip architecture is built on a model in which a storage capacitor is coupled with a signaling transistor to form a programmable metallization cell. The PZT material in ferroreelectric RAM is what gives it the ability to hold data without access to power. While the architecture is based on the same model as DRAM and both store data as binary strings of ones and zeros, only ferroelectric RAM has phase change memory, in which data is permanently embedded until a field applied electric does not erase or overwrite them. In this sense, ferroelectric RAM works the same way as flash memory or an EEPROM chip, except that the read-write speed is much faster and it can be repeated many times before the FRAM chip starts to fail and the level of energy consumption is much lower.
Because ferroelectric RAM can have read-write access speeds 30,000 times faster than a standard EEPROM chip, coupled with the fact that it can last 100,000 times longer and have only 1/200th the power consumption of EEPROM, it is a type of track memory forerunner. Racetrack memory is a type of universal, non-volatile solid-state memory under development in the United States that could eventually replace standard computer hard drives and portable flash memory devices. Once commercialized, track memory is expected to have read-write speeds 100 times faster than current ferroelectric RAM, or 3,000,000 times faster than the performance level of a standard hard drive as of 2011.
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