The program and erase injection current characteristics of a NROM with SiO 2 , HfO 2 , LaAlO 3 and Al 2 O 3 as the tunnel dielectric, respectively, are studied in this paper. Due to the lower electron and hole energy barriers introduced by LaAlO 3 , both the program and erase injection current densities of the NROM using LaAlO 3 as the tunnel dielectric are increased dramatically. The injection efficiency is also improved significantly, which indicates that the introduction of LaAlO 3 can lower the operation voltage of NROM cells. We show that the bit line voltage can be reduced to 3 V for both program and erase operations of NROM cells with LaAlO 3 of 5 nm and 8 nm equivalent oxide thickness (EOT). This can greatly reduce the additional circuits to generate high voltages in a nonvolatile memory chip, meanwhile maintaining sufficient program/erase (P/E) performance and reliability. Our study also shows that the drain disturb is alleviated during programming and erasing the NROM cell with the LaAlO 3 tunnel dielectric due to the lower operating voltages (V BL = 3 V). Hence a low-voltage low-power NROM flash memory device operation can be achieved by using LaAlO 3 as the tunnel dielectric, due to the enhancement of the P/E injection current.
The flash memory technology meets physical and technical obstacles in further scaling. New structures and new materials are implemented as possible solutions. This paper focuses on two kinds of new flash cells for high density and low power memory applications based on the vertical channel double gate structure. The proposed VD-NROM with dual-nitride-trapping-layer and vertical structure can achieve four-bit-per-cell storage capability. And the proposed VSAS-FG cell benefits the high programming efficiency, low power and high density capability, which can be realized without any additional mask and can achieve the self-alignment of the split-gate channel and the floating-gate. The two novel flash cell structures can be considered as potential candidates for different flash memory applications.double gate devices, flash memory, high density, low power
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