A Novel Nanowire Channel Poly-Si TFT Functioning as Transistor and Nonvolatile SONOS Memory

Author

Chen, Shih-Ching ; Chang, Ting-Chang ; Liu, Po-Tsun ; Wu, Yung-Chun ; Lin, Po-Shun ; Tseng, Bae-Heng ; Shy, Jang-Hung ; Sze, S.M. ; Chang, Chun-Yen ; Lien, Chen-Hsin

Author_Institution

Nat. Tsing Hua Univ., Hsinchu

Volume

28

Issue

9

fYear

2007

Firstpage

809

Lastpage

811

Abstract

In this letter, a polycrystalline silicon thin-film transistor consisting of silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon (SONOS) stack gate dielectric and nanowire (NW) channels was investigated for the applications of transistor and nonvolatile memory. The proposed device, which is named as NW SONOS-TFT, has superior electrical characteristics of transistor, including a higher drain current, a smaller threshold voltage (V_th) , and a steeper subthreshold slope. Moreover, the NW SONOS-TFT also can exhibit high program/erase efficiency under adequate bias operation. The duality of both transistor and memory device for the NW SONOS-TFT can be attributed to the trigate structure and channel corner effect.

Keywords

elemental semiconductors; nanowires; random-access storage; silicon; thin film transistors; NW SONOS-TFT; NW channels; Poly-Si TFT; Si; channel corner effect; electrical characteristics; nanowire channel; nonvolatile SONOS memory; polycrystalline silicon thin-film transistor; program/erase efficiency; silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon; trigate structure; Active matrix technology; Dielectrics; Electric variables; Laser sintering; Liquid crystal displays; Nonvolatile memory; SONOS devices; Silicon; Thin film transistors; Threshold voltage; Nanowire (NW); nonvolatile memory; polysilicon (poly-Si); silicon–oxide–nitride–oxide–silicon (SONOS); thin-film transistor (TFT);

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Electron Device Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0741-3106

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/LED.2007.903885

Filename

4294050