Title :
Retention Reliability Improvement of SONOS Non-volatile Memory with N2O Oxidation Tunnel Oxide
Author :
Wu, Jia-Lin ; Kao, Chin-Hsing ; Chien, Hua-Ching ; Tsai, Tzung-Kuen ; Lee, Chih-Yuan ; Liao, Chien-Wei ; Chou, Chung-Yu ; Yang, Min-I
Author_Institution :
Chung-Cheng Inst. of Technol., Nat. Defense Univ., Taoyuan
fDate :
Oct. 16 2006-Sept. 19 2006
Abstract :
The reliability characteristics of polysilicon-oxide-nitride-oxide -silicon (SONOS) devices with different thin tunnel oxides are studied. The tunnel oxynitride growth in a pure N2O ambient with high temperature has better performance than in a dry oxidation with N2 annealing treatment including leakage current, programming speed, read disturb and retention. Besides, the surface roughness and interface states between tunnel oxide and Si substrate are also observed by atomic force microscope (AFM) technique and charge-pumping method to evaluate interfacial nitrogen incorporation. The results show that the reliability of data retention obtained a significant improvement while maintaining good programming/erase performance and can provide a straightforward way of reliability improvement for future flash memory application
Keywords :
atomic force microscopy; circuit reliability; interface states; leakage currents; oxidation; random-access storage; surface roughness; Flash memory; SONOS nonvolatile memory; atomic force microscope; charge-pumping method; data retention; interface states; interfacial nitrogen incorporation; leakage current; oxidation tunnel oxide; programming speed; read disturb; retention reliability improvement; surface roughness; Annealing; Atomic force microscopy; Leakage current; Nonvolatile memory; Oxidation; Rough surfaces; SONOS devices; Surface roughness; Surface treatment; Temperature;
Conference_Titel :
Integrated Reliability Workshop Final Report, 2006 IEEE International
Conference_Location :
South Lake Tahoe, CA
Print_ISBN :
1-4244-0296-4
Electronic_ISBN :
1930-8841
DOI :
10.1109/IRWS.2006.305248
