Design and scaling of a SONOS multidielectric device for nonvolatile memory applications

Charge trapping behavior of SiO2-Anodic Al2O3–SiO2 gate dielectrics for nonvolatile memory applications

“…In order to achieve high density, where device fabrication can no longer be simply scaled to progressively smaller sizes, SONOS structure would be considerable effort to develop replacement dielectrics for memory devices. SONOS, a charge trapping device, has been given more attention than the conventional floating gate one in recent nonvolatile memory applications because of its numerous advantages such as excellent scalability, repetitive electrical program/erase capability, radiation hardness, and low power consumption [3]. However, SONOS lacks reliable retention properties at elevated temperature because of the very thin tunnel oxides with thicknesses of 2-3 nm and the moderate activation energy of nitride traps.…”

“…Al 2 O 3 film is a promising candidate as a charge trapping layer due to its large bandgap value of 8.9 eV, large conduction band-offset of Si/Al 2 O 3 (=2.8 eV), dielectric constant value of 9, and high thermal stability, making it a possible replacement for the traditional silicon nitride layer in ONO (oxide-nitride-oxide) structures [3]. Additionally, the dielectric constant of aluminum oxide is higher than that of silicon nitride, which could reduce the operating voltage.…”

Novel SONOS – type nonvolatile memory device with stacked tunneling and charge trapping layers

“…Thus, the applications of new structures and new materials on NVM were widely studied in recently years. The polysilicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon (SO-NOS) device is one of the most attractive candidates to realize the continuity of vertical scaling on NVM device through the mechanism of charge trapping in its structure [2][3]. In SONOS device, charges are stored in discrete traps of Si 3 N 4 trapping layers instead of continuous floating-gate.…”

Comparative investigation of endurance and bias temperature instability characteristics in metal-Al2O3-nitride-oxide-semiconductor (MANOS) and semiconductor-oxide-nitride-oxide-semiconductor (SONOS) charge trap flash memory

“…CTF memories have various advantages including low voltage operation, good retention, better scalability, and compatibility with complementary metaloxide-semiconductor (CMOS) VLSI technologies [2]. Especially CTF memories with NAND-type flash cell arrays have been reported for the purpose of replacing the commercial mass data storage disks [3,4] and their P/E operations are based on the Fowler-Nordheim (FN) tunneling [5][6][7].…”