When the fifth generation wireless technology for digital cellular networks (5G) starts to be fully commercialized in the 2020s, not only the amount of data, but also the data transmission frequency will increase dramatically with respect to information transmitted via the Internet of Things (IoT). Therefore, in order to record information in real time, memory device is required to have a high read/write endurance with the physical robustness that enables data to be written without error even at an extremely high rewrite cycles.

Recently edge computing in IoT is advancing by increasing mobile devices with artificial intelligence (AI) and many sensing data or parameters are frequently rewritten to memory installed on such devices. The faster IoT leads to increasing frequency of data updates, therefore, memory with high read/write endurance is also required here.

Intense competition among leading IT companies as well as other mobility companies is taking place around the world to develop ADAS for autonomous driving. In order to ensure the safety of autonomous driving and to record the situation in the event of an accident, in particular, it is necessary to continuously record the situations of a traveling vehicle as data. Here again, nonvolatile memory with high rewrite endurance is required.

These days, robots—from industrial robots to entertainment robots—are widely employed in all kinds of fields.
The three major elements of robots are the intelligence (computer control), actuators and sensors. In order to precisely control actuators such as robot arms, memory that can record 3D position information from sensors in real time is required.
In the event of a power outage or instantaneous interruption, memory featuring fast writing speed is essential to record the position information at that moment.