Nano-Scale Flash in the Mid-Decade

2005 and 2006 could be dubbed the "Flash Years", since we have seen incredible growth in the segment, to the point that more flash-memory bits have now been sold than DRAM. This is largely due to consumer products such as media players, cell phones, and digital cameras. Chipworks, as a supplier of competitive intelligence to the semiconductor and electronics industries, monitors the evolution of chip processes as they come into commercial production. Chip-works has obtained parts from the leading edge manufacturers, and performed structural analyses to examine the features and manufacturing processes of the devices. The paper discusses some of the different products seen in the Flash sector, with particular reference to the memory cells. The paper will detail the physical structures we have analyzed, and also examine the different approaches to the implementation of single- and multi-level cells (SLC and MLC).