An international research team has unveiled a new technology that could surpass the limits of storage capacity and performance in next-generation semiconductors. By implementing a so-called "smart doorway" structure that adjusts the movement of electrons inside a semiconductor as needed, the technology is expected to further boost the competitiveness of ultra-high-capacity memory.
KAIST said on the 20th that a research team led by Professor Cho Byung-jin of the School of Electrical Engineering developed a technology that precisely controls electron flow in semiconductor devices using a new material. The research was presented at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in Dec., and won the grand prize, first overall in the university institutional sector, at the 32nd Samsung HumanTech Paper Award hosted by Samsung Electronics.
3D V-NAND memory stacks the cells that store data vertically rather than on a flat plane to increase storage capacity. NAND flash memory used in smartphones and SSDs can retain data even when the power is off, making it a representative nonvolatile memory.
However, existing NAND flash has consistently been criticized for slower speeds during the write-and-erase process and for performance degradation with repeated use.
To solve these problems, the research team applied a new material called "boron oxynitride (BON)." Devices using BON achieved up to 23 times faster data erase speeds than before, and showed almost no performance degradation even after tens of thousands of repeated operations.
Based on this, the team succeeded in distinguishing 32 finer voltage states more precisely in a penta-level cell (PLC) environment that stores 5 bits in a single memory cell. As a result, data distribution across devices could be controlled with more than three times the precision of existing methods. PLC is known as a technology that, while highly efficient in storage, requires high precision and reliability.
Professor Cho Byung-jin said, "This study is an original technology that can be directly applied to the manufacturing process of next-generation ultra-high-capacity memory," adding, "It is expected to play a major role in helping Korea maintain its overwhelming technological lead in semiconductors."
References
IEDM (2025), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/IEDM50572.2025.11353681