A 6 V embedded 90 nm silicon nanocrystal nonvolatile memory

Transient charging current measurements and modelling in silicon nanocrystal floating gate devices

“…These considerations are commonly considered as critical points for the scaling of Flash memories beyond the 45 nm node [2]. In this context, the use of nanocrystals as discrete nano-floating gates, proposed by Tiwari in 1996 [3], has attracted a growing attention since its industrial potential has been favourably evaluated [4][5][6][7][8][9]. In these devices, the information is expected to be stored into nanocrystals.…”

On the electrostatic behavior of floating nanoconductors

“…In the field of non-volatile memory devices (NVM), replacing the traditional floating gate by silicon nanocrystals is a promising way to push the downscaling of these devices toward sub-100 nm technological nodes [1,3]. Using this technique, high density silicon nanocrystals, up to 10 12 cm À2 , are required to achieve a sufficient programming window and reduce electrical fluctuation from one device to the other [1,4,5].…”

Integration of CVD silicon nanocrystals in a 32Mb NOR flash memory

“…Nevertheless, it should be stated that to date, the promising performances of Si-NC memories have been mainly demonstrated on single cells or medium-sized arrays (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16) [1][2][3][4][5][6]. An extensive set of experiments, including performance and reliability data of large-scale integrated memories should still be provided.…”

“…Silicon nanocrystal (Si-NC) memories are one of the most promising solutions to push the scaling limits of Flash memories at least to the 32-20 nm technology nodes [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Due to their discrete nature, Si-NCs are robust to defects in the oxide.…”