Engineering a planar NAND cell scalable to 20nm and beyond

Intel-Micron have recently introduced a scalable planar NAND cell for the 20nm technology. Replacement of conventional wrap floating gate (FG) NAND memory cell with a High-K/Metal gate planar cell that can scale to the 20nm node and beyond was a significant challenge and required comprehensive material and cell exploration and optimization. This paper discusses some of the fundamental cell design issues considered and addressed to arrive at this planar cell technology including the reasoning behind choosing the planar floating gate cell over the nano-crystal cell, and the nitride cell.