Impact of the minority carrier outflow (MCO) effect on the /spl alpha/-particle-induced soft error of scaled DRAMs

This paper describes the new /spl alpha/-particle induced soft error mechanism, the Minority Carrier Outflow (MCO) effect which seriously affects the reliability of the scaled DRAMs with three dimensional capacitors. The MCO charge increases as the device scales down because the initially generated charge becomes larger as the stack height or trench depth increases and also because the minority carrier density increases as the storage node volume decreases. The life time of the minority carrier in the storage node strongly affects the MCO charge, however, even when the life time is as small as /spl sim/100 ps, the MCO effect can be the major soft error mechanism.<>