Abstract
This paper presents a novel nonvolatile poly-Si-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon-type Flash memory that was fabricated using hafnium oxide (HfO2) nanocrystals as the trapping storage layer. The formation of HfO2 nanocrystals was confirmed using a number of physical analytical techniques, including energy-dispersive spectroscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. These newly developed HfO2 nanocrystal memory cells exhibit very little lateral or vertical stored charge migration after 10 k program/erase (P/E) cycles. According to the temperature-activated Arrhenius model, we estimate that the activation energy lies within the range 2.1-3.3 eV. These HfO2 nanocrystal memories exhibit excellent data retention, endurance, and good reliability, even for the cells subjected to 10 k P/E cycles. These features suggest that such cells are very useful for high-density two-bit nonvolatile Flash memory applications.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 782-789 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Journal | IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices |
Volume | 53 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 1 Apr 2006 |
Keywords
- Flash memory
- Hafnium oxide (HfO)
- Nanocrystals
- Nonvolatile memories