Impact on soft error rate of using platinum electrodes in 1 Gb DRAMs

We have investigated the impact on soft error rate (SER) of introducing platinum (Pt) as the capacitor electrodes in 1 Gb DRAM technology. For 0.16 /spl mu/m feature size, we find that direct a particle strikes only cause errors for a critical charge below 6 fC. However, silicon nuclei recoils via Rutherford scattering from these /spl alpha/ particles have sufficient energy to cause soft errors up to about 60 fC of critical charge. The number of such recoils with sufficient energy to cause soft errors is found to be at least 20/spl times/-100/spl times/ smaller than that of the nuclei recoils generated by cosmic-ray neutrons. This indicates that introducing Pt electrodes in a 1 Gb DRAM will not degrade its SER performance as long as the critical charge is kept above 6 fC.