Substrate injection induced program disturb-a new reliability consideration for flash-EPROM arrays

The development of high-density flash EPROMs is being directed towards scalability, sector erase, and 5-V-only operation. For the flash concepts that are utilizing channel hot electron injection for the programming, a new disturbance mechanism caused by substrate injection of thermally generated electrons is reported. This mechanism disturbs an erased call during programming cycles of other bits along the same bitline. The high-temperature programming requirement for flash EPROMs drastically enhances the disturbance through the strong increase in thermally generated electrons in the substrate. This program disturbance has the greatest impact on the wordline oriented sector erase memory architectures, through the increase in disturbance time.<>