Nitride Thickness Scaling Limitations in TANOS Charge Trapping Devices

This article demonstrates that the scaling of the charge trap layer leads to an increasing charge loss in retention mode. This result is assigned to the fact that the blocking aluminum oxide is the main leakage path. It is further presented that the charge distribution moves towards the top oxide during programming and therefore shortens the distance to the leakage path. For thinner charge trap layers, the traps close to the aluminum oxide interface are already filled at lower DeltaV_t resulting in higher retention loss for the same V_t shift.