This article is an overview of emerging memory materials and their role in advanced brain-inspired computing technologies. It starts with the progress of memory technologies over the last 50 years along with emergence and dominance of NAND flash in the memory market. Though flash is currently leading the memory market due to its high volume manufacturing and low cost, it has a latency gap with dynamic random access memory. To address this, various nonvolatile memories have been explored across the world potentially to replace flash. Here, an overview of various major emerging nonvolatile memory (NVM) technologies is presented. Along with the global view of NVMs as their current status as a storage solution, the research of NVMs in India is discussed briefly with a focus on resistance random access memory and phase change memory. Further, the need of brain-inspired advanced computing technologies like neuromorphic computing, in-memory computing are discussed along with the utility of the NVMs for such brain-inspired computing technologies. Finally, various NVMs are presented for their unique characteristic to mimic synapse, neuron functionalities as required for neuromorphic computing and for in-memory computing solutions.

本文概述了新兴的记忆材料及其在先进的类脑计算技术中的作用。它始于过去 50 年内存技术的进步以及 NAND 闪存在内存市场中的出现和主导地位。尽管闪存由于其高产量和低成本而目前在内存市场处于领先地位，但它与动态随机存取内存存在延迟差距。为了解决这个问题，世界各地都在探索各种可能取代闪存的非易失性存储器。此处概述了各种主要的新兴非易失性存储器 (NVM) 技术。随着全球对 NVM 作为存储解决方案的现状的看法，本文简要讨论了印度的 NVM 研究，重点是电阻随机存取存储器和相变存储器。更远，讨论了神经形态计算、内存计算等类脑高级计算技术的需求，以及 NVM 在此类类脑计算技术中的实用性。最后，根据神经形态计算和内存计算解决方案的要求，介绍了各种 NVM 的独特特性，以模仿突触、神经元功能。