Investigation of the soft-write mechanism in source-side injection flash EEPROM devices

Author

Van Houdt, Jan F. ; Wellekens, Dirk ; Groeseneken, Guido ; Maes, Herman E.

Author_Institution

IMEC, Leuven, Belgium

Volume

16

Issue

5

fYear

1995

fDate

5/1/1995 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

181

Lastpage

183

Abstract

The soft-write effect which occurs when reading the content of a source-side injection (SSI) flash EEPROM cell has been identified and thoroughly investigated. This effect is caused by an electron injection mechanism which has the same physical origin as the enhanced (or source-side) hot-electron injection that is used for fast flash EEPROM programming. A procedure for the prediction of the associated soft-write lifetime is proposed, subsequently applied to a state-of-the-art split-gate SSI cell, and found to be noncritical for a reliable device operation. Therefore, source and drain do not have to be interchanged during the read-out operation with respect to the programming operation, and the traditional forward read-out scheme can be maintained for SSI flash memories.<>

Keywords

EPROM; MOS memory circuits; cellular arrays; integrated circuit reliability; MOS cells; electron injection mechanism; flash EEPROM devices; forward read-out scheme; reliable device operation; soft-write mechanism; source-side injection; split-gate SSI cell; Capacitors; Character generation; EPROM; Equations; Equivalent circuits; Flash memory cells; Nonvolatile memory; Secondary generated hot electron injection; Split gate flash memory cells; Voltage;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Electron Device Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0741-3106

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/55.382233

Filename

382233