Effects of ultra-narrow channel on characteristics of MOSFET memory with silicon nanocrystal floating gates

This paper describes the improved characteristics of a newly proposed ultra-narrow channel floating-dot memory where the channel width is scaled to sub-10 nm. Thanks to the classical bottleneck effect and the quantum confinement effect, large threshold voltage shift and long retention time have been obtained in the fabricated ultra-narrow channel memory. The extreme case of the proposed ultra-narrow channel memory is the ultimate single-electron memory where one bit is represented by one electron. In the narrowest (5 nm) channel device, the threefold increase in drain current has been actually observed due to the discharging of a single electron from a dot.