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Emerging Memory (EM) is a broad class of memory devices leveraging a wide spectrum of physical phenomena and/or material properties, that go beyond the charge storage concept of more conventional NAND and DRAM technologies. Availability of physical models and simulation tools to understand their behavior, predict performance, engineer materials and cell architecture would be extremely useful for their successful development. However, such tools are not always available because of the diversity and complexity of the physical mechanisms. This paper would like to review the main trends of the on-going modeling and simulation activities in the field of EM, trying to point out what are the needs and challenges for the future.

We briefly discuss the evolution of Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) technology in term of macro-trends and their implications for modeling activities in an industrial R&D environment. Some examples of difficult modeling issues for different NVM techologies are mentioned, and finally both present needs and future challanges are critically reviewed.

In this work, we present a reliability investigation of T-RAM cells, considering their read failure, data retention and endurance. Experimental results on decananometer devices reveal a successful cell operation solving the voltage trade-off for optimal performance on state-0 and state-1, whose origin is explained by clear pictures of the physical processes giving rise to read failure and limiting data retention. Moreover, endurance results appear very promising, with cell functionality preserved up to very high cycling doses.

This work investigates the performance of the statistical impedance field method in the analysis of the amplitude of random telegraph noise fluctuations in nanoscale MOS devices. Considering different channel doping profiles, we show that this method offers a practical compromise between accuracy and computational loads, allowing a good assessment of the RTN amplitude statistics while resulting in non-negligible errors on the single microscopic samples where atomistic doping strongly contributes to non-uniformities of channel inversion and to percolative source-to-drain conduction.

In this paper we propose an analytical model for the static operation of thyristor, aiming at clarifying the basic physics involved in the switching from the low-conductance to the high-conductance state of the device. Modeling results are compared to TCAD numerical simulations, showing that the analytical calculations can nicely reproduce the main features of the current-voltage device characteristics.