An experimental 4 Mb flash EEPROM with sector erase

Author

McConnell, Mike ; Ashmore, Buster ; Bussey, Rick ; Gill, Manzur ; Lin, Sung-Wei ; McElroy, Dave ; Schreck, John F. ; Shah, Pradeep ; Stiegler, Harvey ; Truong, Phat ; Esquivel, Agerico L. ; Paterson, Jim ; Riemenschneider, Bert

Author_Institution

Texas Instrum. Inc., Houston, TX, USA

Volume

26

Issue

4

fYear

1991

fDate

4/1/1991 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

484

Lastpage

491

Abstract

A 512K×8 flash EEPROM (electrically erasable programmable ROM) which operates from a single 5-V supply was designed and fabricated. A double-poly, single-metal CMOS process with a minimum feature size of 0.9 μm was developed to manufacture the test vehicle, which resulted in a die size of 95 mm². The storage cell is 8.64 μm² and consists of a one-transistor cell that uses a remote, scalable, tunnel diode for programming and erasing by Fowler-Nordheim tunneling. Process high-voltage requirements are relaxed by utilizing circuit techniques to alleviate the burden of high voltages. A segmented architecture provides the flexibility to erase any one sector (16 kB) or the entire chip during one cycle by an erase algorithm. The memory can be programmed one byte at a time, or the internal bit-line latches can be used to program a 256-B page in one cycle. A programming time of 10 ms is typical, which results in a write time of 40 μs/B during page programming. The chip features an access time of 90 ns

Keywords

CMOS integrated circuits; EPROM; VLSI; integrated memory circuits; 0.9 micron; 10 ms; 4 Mbit; 5 V; 90 ns; Fowler-Nordheim tunneling; access time; double-poly; electrically erasable programmable ROM; flash EEPROM; minimum feature size; one-transistor cell; programming time; sector erase; segmented architecture; single 5-V supply; single-metal CMOS process; CMOS process; Circuits; Diodes; EPROM; Manufacturing processes; Read only memory; Testing; Tunneling; Vehicles; Voltage;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Journal of

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9200

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/4.75043

Filename

75043