Dedicated Instrumentation for Single-Electron Effects Detection in Si Nanocrystal Memories

In this paper we propose a purposely designed instrumentation and the experimental set-up for the detection of single-electron phenomena in solid-state non-volatile memories based on silicon nanocrystals floating gate MOSFET. The stepwise evolution of the drain current of a memory cell, after a "write" operation, is monitored by means of a purposely designed low noise acquisition system with a bandwidth up to 10 kHz. The advantage of the measurement system background noise and bandwidth over traditional semiconductor parameter analyzer performance is evident on the detection and classification of single-electron events