A comparative study of characterization techniques for oxide reliability in flash memories

We compare two different methods for extracting the leakage distribution from accelerated data-retention experiments. It is shown that the equivalent-cell (EC) scheme, which provides a fast estimation of leakage distribution in the array, is totally accurate as compared to a more detailed analysis of single memory cells within the array. The fair agreement between the results of the two characterization schemes is explained, and advantages of the EC technique for fast reliability monitoring in Flash memories are discussed.