Physical Understanding of SANOS Disturbs and VARIOT Engineered Barrier as a Solution

Both read and program disturb sensitivity are identified to be major drawbacks for nitride-based NAND Flash arrays. The crucial aspects to understand the disturbs are the injection of electrons at low fields through the bottom oxide, and the tunneling through the top oxide during programming. These results are exploited to identify possible improvements of the device. A VARIOT engineered barrier is proposed to replace the bottom oxide layer in order to significantly reduce the disturb problem.