Low-Temperature Polycrystalline Silicon Thin-Film Flash Memory With Hafnium Silicate

Author

Lin, Yu-Hsien ; Chien, Chao-Hsin ; Chou, Tung-Huan ; Chao, Tien-Sheng ; Lei, Tan-Fu

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electron. Eng., Nat. Chiao Tung Univ., Hsinchu

Volume

54

Issue

3

fYear

2007

fDate

3/1/2007 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

531

Lastpage

536

Abstract

In this paper, we have successfully fabricated poly-Si-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon (SONOS)-type poly-Si-thin-film transistor (TFT) memories employing hafnium silicate as the trapping layer with low-thermal budget processing (les600degC). It was demonstrated that the fabricated memories exhibited good performance in terms of relatively large memory window, high program/erase speed (1 ms/10 ms), long retention time (>10⁶ s for 20% charge loss), and 2-bit operation. Interestingly, we found that these memories depicted very unique disturbance behaviors, which are obviously distinct from those observed in the conventional SONOS-type Flash memories. We thought these specific characteristics are closely related to the presence of the inherent defects along the grain boundaries. Therefore, the elimination of the traps along the grain boundaries in the channel is an important factor for achieving high performance of the SONOS-type poly-Si-TFT Flash memory

Keywords

flash memories; hafnium compounds; random-access storage; thin film transistors; HfSi; flash memory; hafnium silicate; nonvolatile memories; poly-Si-TFT; polycrystalline silicon thin-film transistor; Associate members; Chaos; Fabrication; Flash memory; Grain boundaries; Hafnium; Nonvolatile memory; Semiconductor thin films; Silicon; Thin film transistors; Flash memory; hafnium silicate; nonvolatile memories; polycrystalline silicon thin-film transistor (poly-Si-TFT);

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Electron Devices, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9383

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TED.2006.890379

Filename

4114848