Analysis of oxide bulk trapped charge distribution and densities from photo injection characteristics of oxide-nitride-oxide (ONO) structures

The thickness of ONO inter-poly dielectrics dominates the program and erase speed of a flash memory cell transistor with a stack gate structure. Therefore, as flash devices shrink, it is important to prevent the degradation in reliability while scaling down the thickness of the oxide. However, the thickness of the bottom oxide formed on a heavily doped poly-silicon cannot be easily reduced because of its high defect density due to a high concentration of dopants in the floating gate and an enhancement of the oxide thickness caused by oxidation of the doped polysilicon. In order to overcome these problems, advanced LPCVD technology has been introduced, but the LPCVD oxide films still have many defect densities in comparison with thermal oxide films. In this work, the bulk trapped charges distribution and density in the bottom LPCVD oxide were quantitatively investigated by photocurrent-voltage characteristics. In addition, we found that the defect density and distribution in the bottom LPCVD oxide were remarkably decreased using post plasma oxidation.