This invention relates to integrated circuits including memory structures and relates to methods for making such memory structures and to methods using such memory structures in electronic devices.
As computer and other electrical equipment prices continue to drop, the manufacturers of storage devices, such as memory devices and hard drives, are forced to lower the cost of their components. At the same time, markets for computers, video games, televisions and other electrical devices are requiring increasingly larger amounts of memory to store images, photographs, videos, movies, music, and other storage intensive data. Thus, besides reducing costs, manufacturers of storage devices must also increase the storage density of their devices. This trend of increasing memory storage-density while reducing costs required to create the storage has been on-going for many years, and even optical storage media, such as CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RIW, DVD, and DVD-R variants, are being challenged by device size limitations and costs. There is accordingly a need for economical, high capacity memory structures and methods for control of such memory structures. While resistive elements, transistors, and diodes have been used as control elements in the past, they have had various shortcomings in speed, silicon area requirements, and in allowing xe2x80x9csneak paths.xe2x80x9d
USPTO Backgrounds
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