Effects of floating body on double polysilicon partially depleted SOI nonvolatile memory cell

The floating-body effect of nonvolatile memory cells fabricated using partially depleted silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology has been investigated using two-dimensional numerical device simulation. Compared with similar bulk devices, the floating-body effect of partially depleted SOI MOSFETs introduces instability in the value of the drain current during sensing and extra hot-electron gate current in programming. The effects of the drain-current instability on the error margins in read operation are studied. The floating-body effect is found to be heavily dependent on biasing condition.